


violent children don't need a home

by KilltheDJ



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), My Chemical Romance
Genre: (About Red), Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Origin Stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23163187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KilltheDJ/pseuds/KilltheDJ
Summary: Party Poison always was a curious child. Too curious, maybe, for the experimental soldier he was supposed to be. There was nothing quite like curiosity, like a secret, nothing quite like the headstrong nature of children.And that? That's how theFabulous Killjoyscame to be.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 35





	violent children don't need a home

_ “What will save us?”  _

The sentiment’s followed Poison around for years. Why did he ask that, out of anything? Why did he ask a question outside of the regulations? Why did he, at twelve, think about a savior?

There was no reason to ask. 

It spread, though, like wildfire, like it was the most non-conforming thought anyone had ever had, through the group of twenty-six, all confined to the same white room with thirteen bunk beds. The group of children, too young to know why they should shut their mouths, why they should stop whispering.

The people in white were always watching. 

No one knew who to blame - who would say something so risky? Poison intended to keep it that way. It had to stay that way. He didn’t know why he thought it was so dangerous, but as it turned out, it was dangerous. 

Poison always intended to make sure it was impossible to pick him apart from the crowd, from the others in the same white uniform and buzzcut as him. Letting them know it was him who started the murmuring would lose him that anonymity. 

Poison should’ve known Kobra couldn’t keep his mouth shut; he hadn’t learned why he should. Kobra would learn, and he would learn to stop speaking entirely for a time. 

_ Twelve-years-old _ , Poison’s standard blank-faced doctor told him,  _ that’s when you start to change. Physically, mentally - both of them... You have to be careful at your age, kid. Don’t go getting ideas. _

It wasn’t that he started to get ideas. It wasn’t that he started to care about how much his voice started to crack or how his face was slowly getting more red with more bumps. It wasn’t that he set out to get ideas. 

It was that Poison started to look between the cracks in the walls, in his life, covered only by the layer of authority that hung over him.

Poison had never led a normal life, though he hadn’t known that until his suppressed curiosity took hold of his decisions. The life he was designed to lead was learning the best way to execute an order and enacting it without question.

Like a factory worker, but with intentions more sinister than child labor.

Everything Poison did, everything he heard was an order. From waking up in the morning, to putting on his assigned white uniform offset only by the number inked onto his front pocket, to eating the breakfast of nutritional bars he was given.

It was an order, but Poison hadn’t realized that. It was a routine, and he liked routine. He liked knowing what was happening - waking up, training, going to sleep at night.

At least, Poison used to assume it was night. He’d never seen the sunlight or the sky before; he’d heard about them, but Poison had never experienced them for himself.

He would! He’d see the sun, the sky, when he was ready. When he was experienced and old enough to know how to take orders from a distance, enact them without the looming threat of Black Out.

How ironic. Someone destined to be a child of the sun and the sand, _ the  _ child of the sun and the sand, confined to artificial light.

Maybe that’s why he was destined to become his  _ own _ light, his own supernova. 

Nevertheless, maybe that phrase, that question he wasn’t supposed to ask, was his saving grace. Maybe the negligence of an answer to his question quickly-hushed question was why he coddled the rebellion forming like a pulse bomb in his chest.

Poison was a ticking time-bomb. And every time-bomb was destined to go off, wasn’t it? 

Except Poison was destined to go off more than once. He wasn’t just a pulse bomb or a supernova; he was Party Poison, even if he didn’t know it yet.

The first time Poison detonated wasn’t intentional, wasn’t something he crafted and manipulated. Being a twelve-year-old, everything Poison learned about himself was accidental. Everything he learned about the place and the people that had raised him was out of a growing curiosity he couldn’t satiate. 

He knew, by then, that nothing was meant to be out of place. He wasn’t supposed to give in to the temptation; he wasn’t supposed to ask why he wanted to. 

And yet, there was a malfunction in the machine. A human error.

An error that changed the course of Battery City. An error that caused Party Poison to start on the long road to becoming a Fabulous Killjoy. 

Someone wasn’t where they were supposed to be. Due to a scheduling error or a long lunch break, Poison didn’t know, but at the time he hadn’t cared in the slightest. 

Poison took the opportunity, glancing out the door in confusion when he didn’t see the usual guard - he didn’t have many opportunities like that, not when he was supposed to act like an obedient caged animal confined to the scraps it was given. 

His version of taking that opportunity was slipping out of the dormitory, where he and all the other kids were eating lunch. There wasn’t a Drac outside of the door that day, and of course, Poison had taken note.

He took note of everything he saw. That was, after all, what he was trained to do. Examine his surroundings, make observations, and examine every possible course of action.

That specific course of action just happened to be against protocol. But he’d also been taught that one of the major elements of a good disguise was to stand out. 

Stand out, walk proud. Walk like he was supposed to be walking down that blank white corridor, and no one would question you. They weren’t  _ programmed _ to question anyone who didn’t look suspicious. 

Low-level operatives were nothing more than chess pieces designed to be thrown away at will. Poison had always been told that one day he would have a squadron of his own, to order around. One day he would give orders, be important.

It was all a lie, but back then, twelve-years-old with baby chub still sticking to his cheeks, he didn’t know that. He didn’t know he was living a lie crafted ever since he was even an idea in someone’s head. 

The unlocked room he found at the end of that white hallway he knew all-too-well changed everything. It detonated the bomb forming in where his heart wasn’t supposed to be, it changed the way he saw his prison.

Because, in that room - and Poison still remembers pushing it open with too much hesitance, freezing at the _ creak _ that followed - was a file. For every single child he’d grown up with, there was a file.

Paper files, too, which Poison still wondered about. Why were they paper, all taped up like that? Why was the door open?

And why was Poison the one to find it? 

To find out what he was. That he was a statistic in an experiment.

That he was part of something they liked to call GENERATION NOTHING. 

GENERATION NOTHING, it was labeled. That’s all they were, a label or a file in some folder, filed underneath an experiment name, where the general public never had to know about them. 

They were generation nothing. Nothings and nobodies, destined to be soldiers and nothing more.

Poison never got to see what was within those files, what the experiment was about - he ran out too quickly, scared of what he was seeing and scared of being caught, back into the little white box he called his home.

Back to the same group he’d known all his life. The ones in that experiment with him.

And Poison knew, sitting on the top bunk of bunk number four, his knees to his chest as he blinked back all the shocked tears, that he’d known something was wrong, all along.

He’d known something was wrong a year ago, when they took one of his friends away. His friend didn’t come back. Poison couldn’t even recall her name. 

He knew something was wrong when they brought Ghoul back - or the boy destined to become the Fabulous Killjoy known as Fun Ghoul - and Ghoul was suddenly quicker, with metal hidden underneath his jacket sleeve.

He knew something was wrong when his little brother could look him dead in the eye and hit a target dead-center with a blaster, nothing behind his eyes. He was ten! 

They were all just children. Children made for that experiment - they were born for GENERATION NOTHING, weren’t they? Made to be...to be what?

Later, Poison would realize the answer. A soldier - they were born to be soldiers, the best soldier Better Living Industries could design without the pressure of the public eye. 

Poison was _ not  _ going to be another soldier. He was not going to be a weapon, and he wasn’t going to let his brother become a weapon.

No child deserved that. At least, Poison hadn’t thought they did. What did he ever do to deserve being another statistic? What did he do to them? 

And he would do whatever it took to get out of there. They wanted to make him a soldier - he was going to use what they taught him. Maybe they put too much trust into their  _ programming _ to think he wasn’t going to try to escape.

He didn’t have a concrete plan, or any solid idea, but he still knew. He was going to escape. And he was going to take his little brother with him, because he was going to show everyone what GENERATION NOTHING was.

Party Poison was not a nobody. Party Poison was going to be  _ somebody, _ and he couldn’t do that when he was stuck as part of an experiment behind closed doors. 

_

Poison learned how to notice the right things. He learned how to survey the company controlling him the same way he was told to survey suspects; how to observe everything with just the right scrutiny. 

Seeing the sunlight was still just a dream, to the twelve-year-old with high hopes and too much pessimism about things he’d never done.

He’d started treading the line with the others, seeing what they thought. Seeing if they would be able to rebel in the way he wanted them to - to escape.

Most of them he’d have to face in a firefight, years later. Some of them would die because of him, because of the blast that came from his gun.

Some would die because they started to question.

Some would be mindless soldiers, so wholly dedicated to what they believed because they’d been taught the same mantras since birth. Because they weren’t told they were just an experiment. 

But there were a few - five, to be precise - that would listen to him. Poison could tell by the nervous way they answered when he asked if they’d ever thought about what there is beyond all the training. 

Poison wasn’t the only one questioning.

But Poison was the only one who knew about GENERATION NOTHING, about the experiment. 

It wouldn’t be safe to tell them, not yet, or at least he’d assumed it would be. He’d have to hope they trusted him and wanted to get out just as much as he did. 

The name of the craving hadn’t been in his head at the time, but he’d been so tired of the white - anything, anything different would be nice. Even looking at Ghoul, and the way his skin was just a few shades darker than Jet’s was something Poison used to be obsessed with.

Color. He’d been craving color of any kind, anything that wasn’t the bland white he saw everywhere. Like the color he saw when he got punched in the face at training and his lip split open. 

“Kobra, Kobra, you gotta get up,” Poison had whispered, one night, far past 8 P.M. The clock read sometime after midnight, but Poison, at the time, didn’t care. 

It wasn’t Kobra’s name he’d said back then - it was that five-letter, two-syllable name he’d been given at birth, the one that didn’t fit him and never would. Poison had long decided to forget the names - those weren’t their names, not really. Any old names, nicknames; they weren’t right. 

It would be wrong to remember the memories like that. They’d always been killjoys, deserved their names and deserved their terms of affection.

Nevertheless, he was shaking Kobra’s shoulder, trying to get him up without causing too much of a fuss. Some of the kids around them were light sleepers, and if anyone were to wake up and catch them…

“Wha’...?” Kobra asked, rolling over, but Poison slapped a hand over his mouth before he could finish the word. 

Then Kobra tensed up, throwing his hand off and damn near punching Poison in the throat before realizing who he was, then simply looking at him in curiosity. 

That wasn’t the first time Poison ever woke him up in the middle of the night so they could get out of their bunks for a little while. It would be the last, though. 

“We’re leaving,” Poison hissed. 

Then Kobra went  _ oh  _ and seemed to understand, throwing the blankets off soundlessly, moving to the boots at the end of his bed.

Kobra was the first one Poison woke - then he had to wake up Ghoul, Jet, and Cherri.

And someone else, a girl, that would never make it long enough to get a name. The one who showed Cherri that he didn’t have to be someone he wasn’t, that he didn’t have to be a girl, like she didn’t have to be a boy. 

Poison doesn’t like thinking about her.

“How do you plan on getting us out of here?” the girl had asked, wide-eyed with a grin that would’ve been right at home in the desert, too loudly for Poison’s comfort, holding hands with Cherri. 

“We’ll see,” is what Poison told her. He was twelve, too headstrong and confident.

He used to think death couldn’t touch him, because that’s what he was raised to believe from the moment he started consciously retaining memories. 

Death could touch him, and he’d find out very, very soon. 

_ We’ll see  _ was not the best reassurance to give to skittish child soldiers who didn’t quite know what they were getting out of. It was the reassurance they lived with as they all laced up their boots in silence.

Supply backpacks, loaded with real supplies and kept in the corner of their bunk room for simulation survival training, were left behind. They all knew that it wouldn’t be safe to keep them, no matter how tempting. 

All except the switchblades in the back pocket, which Jet gathered and doled out. Those knives would save their lives time and time again in the future, but not now, not when they were too paranoid to step too loudly.

And rightfully so, that paranoia would do them well.

Poison waited until the red clock on the wall read 2 A.M. before he nodded toward the door, waiting until the others caught up with him to keep walking. 

They were really going to do this. 

Poison was going to walk out here - and he was going to see the sunlight! He was going to be able to see the sunlight!

Maybe it was a dumb dream, but it was the only dream that had kept him going for months, when anything felt like hell and when he thought he couldn’t keep going. 

The door creaked open cautiously - after Kobra messed with the paneling or something, it was never open at night. Poison wasn’t good at tech stuff, wasn’t then, wasn’t now. 

The coast was clear. There was no Drac insight. Which was odd, but Poison supposed it was okay because it wasn’t like they expected any of their little test subjects to be out of their containment room past dark.

Poison had thought wrong, but he wouldn’t know for about five minutes.

The halls were completely barren of...anyone. Their little group made little to no noise, having been trained exactly for things like this. 

They had not been trained for getting caught.

Getting caught was not in their vocabulary - yes, the idea of getting caught, what the punishment would be, they knew all that. But none of them, let alone Poison, thought that they wouldn’t get away with it. 

The alarm that started going off, blinking red and screeching enough to make Poison’s heartbeat just as fast, that was what made the idea of failure prominent, tangible, real. 

And _real_ wasn’t good, not for the life they were living.

“Run!” is what Poison shouted, barely glancing back at any of their little group before taking off running down one of the hallways.

He had hold of Kobra’s hand, though. Kobra was smaller, but luckily it wasn’t like Poison was dragging him around because they couldn’t afford to waste time.

Not wasting that time to look back is what saved their lives. Poison knew the moment that several louder, clumping footsteps echoed throughout the white hall that it wasn’t just them now. 

It was real now. It was a chase and they couldn’t go back to being perfect soldiers now - at least, not willing.

Poison wouldn’t go back. Not if it killed him. He wasn’t a lab rat, he wasn’t an experiment, he wasn’t  _ nothing _ . 

Poison raised his free hand to the air, his blood pounding through his veins as escape, escape, escape echoed just as loudly as the rush of danger. 

Maybe everyone was too preoccupied running to watch the way he formed an “L” with his fingers and pushed it to the left, but he damn well hoped they were paying attention because the turn they were supposed to take was soon and escape didn’t wait for them gathering themselves up from a tumble on the wall. 

As it turned out, they were paying attention. Cherri’s shoulder scraped the wall as he turned, but they all made it.

Draculoids were masks strapped onto ordinary citizens - they didn’t have any formal training and they were all dumb as rocks. Something in that mask rotted their souls, their brains away until they were nothing more than a shell and sometimes Poison tried to sympathize.

Running away to freedom, to daylight, was not one of the times he was sympathizing. 

He didn’t know where the exit was.

He didn’t know, but there was an echoing voice in his head telling him which direction to lead the others in and that’s what he listened to. 

To this day he still wonders who told him that - he still wonders whether or not that was subconscious memory from seeing a building map somewhere, or whether it was the work of the Phoenix Witch or Destroya leading him to salvation.

Right.

The Draculoids behind them doubled. Poison wasn’t looking back, couldn’t look back, but he could tell by the sound of their footsteps. 

Left.

A few were lost, but any of the distance advantage they had was lost as they had to wait for Jet to keep going after slamming into the corner. Just as many Dracs.

Left. 

Less Dracs. Too quiet. Too long of a hallway.

Maybe Poison and the others were too valuable to shoot, or at least at the time that’s what he was hoping was the case. Dracs have always had a horrible sense of aim, but when there are at least fifteen chasing you down a narrow, white hallway with a lack of cover?

Yeah, it got scary. It got  _ real. _

_ Run, run, bunny, run.  _

Right.

That turn took Poison straight to a dead-end, slamming his forehead into an unmarked, unlabelled metal door. 

The Dracs were too close behind them. They had nowhere to go, Poison couldn’t fail he couldn’t fail  _ he couldn’t fail! _

Poison wouldn’t fail, if only because Ghoul slammed the door open with too much force to be possible.

It wasn’t Poison’s place to ask and he was happy to be. 

Besides, he didn’t have too much time to think as he yanked the wrist of whoever was closest to him out the door, out the door and hoping they all made it out behind him. They all had to make it out.

They all made it out; one of them slammed the door shut behind them to give a moment of serenity, a moment of catching their breath in the… in the…

Outside. They were outside. Poison still, all this time later, cherishes that moment - he’d been scared, terrified, a starry-eyed kid with dreams bigger than his imagination, but nothing had come close to the moment he first saw outside.

It wasn’t like seeing the Desert for the first time, like he would in a few months. That was like seeing an entire playground that was his to rule, like a king guided to his throne. 

Battery City had regulated weather. 

But it was the first time Poison had ever seen anything other than official light, and for a moment, all of them - all five lab rats, experimental child soldiers - were silent, staring at the sky above them, disregarding the fate that was going to befall them if they stayed where they were.

“C’mon,” Poison had mumbled, dragging himself off the ground - when had he fallen? -, with that same starstruck look on his face that the rest of them had. It was so much different than a lab. “We have to go, they’re gonna - they’re gonna get us.” 

It was Kobra, little Kobra, who spoke up next, taking his big brother’s hand. It was the one and only time they would hold hands in the following years. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. They’re gonna catch us if we stay here.”

“No, they’re not,” Ghoul snorted. In the beginning, Ghoul was always the cocky one, who knew exactly what he wanted to do and when - cause chaos, and all the time. It was that simple to him, black-and-white. “Let’s keep runnin’. See if they can catch up to us!”

Running had never been Poison’s favorite thing in the world, but at that time, he hadn’t realized how ridiculous it was that he and the others, all children by then, barely going through puberty, could run through a lab while getting shot at and show no fatigue moments later, ready to run and bolt through alleys with no direction other than what felt right.

What felt right, huh? Maybe that was when Poison had started governing his decisions by what he felt instead of logic, instead of what should work. It wasn’t exactly a good habit. 

They kept running. It was quite a sight to see, thinking back on it. Five raggedy children dashing through the street in all-white uniforms, grinning like the world was under their control now.

All excitement had to end. 

There were Dracs chasing them for a time, again, but now that they weren’t confined to a small facility they were never allowed to explore it was easy to lose them. Run up a few fire escapes, split-up for a few blocks, come back together and use what they’d been taught all their lives to injure their pursuers. 

When they stopped running - what an odd turn of phrasing. Technically, Poison had been running ever since Ghoul slammed that door open. Technically, they’d all been running. Run, run, bunny, run. 

Things like that stay with you, don’t they?

Nevertheless, when they stopped running, it was in the outskirts of Battery City, or so they thought. It wasn’t anything like the Neon District; it wasn’t anywhere near the Lobby. It was some suburban neighborhood in what they would later find out was the Iridium District. 

Standing huddled in a circle, panting, the grins not quite faded; that was the first time Poison ever had a family.

His family would and always would be those five dorks. 

Jet Star. Poison remembered what he used to look like, with those signature blue curls in a buzzcut and their original black. It wasn’t right, but none of them would find ‘right’ for a while. 

Fun Ghoul. Poison remembered how Ghoul used to get into fights with the other kids in their little experiment; he’d always win them, too, snarling and biting and kicking and punching. Ghoul had never been the best with other people who didn’t understand him. 

Kobra Kid. Destroya, it took Poison years to realize that Kobra wasn’t just his baby brother anymore. That Kobra wasn’t the same kid who held his hand looking at the sky - for him to realize that Kobra was perfectly if not more capable of taking care of himself and kicking some serious ass all the while. 

Cherri Cola. It wasn’t Agent, it hadn’t been Agent in the beginning and it wouldn’t be Agent at the end. Poison remembered the buzzcut he used to have, too. They were all required to have the same hair, the same uniform, the same glassy-eyed allegiance. Cherri was the first to break away from that, to realize that they were well and truly on their own.

And  _ her _ . She was the one who showed them all what they could really be, that maybe it didn’t all have to be tight-lipped smiles at the passersby, that it didn’t have to be all-white, that they could leave, go, go somewhere that wasn’t Battery City.

She’d been Cherri’s best friend. They were the adventurous two, the two that would take over the world with poetry wiping away the others’ tears and blood dripping from their eyes. 

And, like all rebel love songs, it came to an end rather quickly. But not yet, not then.

No, back then, they were still just wide-eyed, slack-jawed kids in love with the sky. 

_

Two months in their newfound freedom and it didn’t feel like freedom anymore. It felt just as suffocating to Poison as the lab; it felt like someone pulling his strings, bringing him back, reminding him that he couldn’t be anything other than part of the experiment they liked to call GENERATION NOTHING.

And it was one of the moments he was lying awake, staring at the artificial stars painted across the manufactured sky, when Poison had the idea.

It wasn’t a grand idea, not at the time. It was something that wouldn’t be realized for a long time - something Poison himself couldn’t grasp, a dream that kept slipping through his fingertips no matter how hard he tried to hold onto it. 

The idea was, put simply to Jet, who he’d woken up excitedly, was, “We can be  _ more. _ ”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jet had asked, rolling over with sleep written plainly in his face.

“It means we can be something!” Poison Was excited to share the idea, whatever the idea may be, because it made him happy in a way he hadn’t ever been. Nothing was realized yet; not even the way Poison had and would always crave the feeling of the sand underneath his boots. 

Not yet. There was nothing back then to show what would become of the Fabulous Killjoys, nothing to tell them what to avoid, how to avoid some of their worst mistakes. 

“What’d’ya mean, be something?” Jet wasn’t annoyed. In fact, Jet had always had the same itch as Poison, but none of them knew that yet. Jet was a revolutionist in a different way than Poison. Jet was excited, and that was all the encouragement Poison had ever needed.

“I mean like… Like…” It was hard to force the words out of his throat, simply because Poison didn’t know what words were supposed to spill out. 

He’d heard the way she talked, whenever she disappeared off with Cherri and grinning. Poison wanted to talk like that. Like everything he said had some purpose, some hidden meaning, something that meant more than repeating orders.

It was hard to replicate that when poking your best friend in the back, waking from the sleep they rarely got in the alley they were staying in because it was your little brother’s watch time. 

“Like… I don’t know! We can - we can be something, something that matters!” Being remembered, mattering to something or someone, that was always something Poison wanted. In fact, he wanted to be remembered by everyone, he wanted to matter to everyone who’d so much as heard his name.

But he didn’t have a name, not back in that alley, and he didn’t have anything worth remembering. The most he had was a secret he kept to himself. The secret of the experiment, of the child soldiers.

The experiment he hadn’t told any of the other escapees about, of course.

Jet didn’t bawk at him, didn’t tell Poison he got his hopes up for nothing. What Jet did was sit up, rub the sleep from his eyes, and lay a head on Poison’s shoulder, smiling at nothing. “And what do you propose for that, huh?”

What could Poison propose? It was a half-formed idea at best, the ideals of a child seeking comfort, seeking to become detached from the possibility of being forgotten blindly.

Because one day, they’d all be gone, and who would remember his name? Who would remember him if he didn’t have a name?

Over the years, death became less of a fear and more of an outlook. 

“Maybe we could…” That was where his next bright idea came from, something out of the blue to back-up his claims to Jet. Poison had never wanted to disappoint Jet and never would, so he needed to say something. He didn’t know how his suggestion would change Battery City as he knew it. “Maybe we could go to the Desert!”

It was late and none of them got enough sleep as it was. Jet shrugged. “Maybe. One day. Maybe you should get some sleep, how about that?” 

“It’s gonna be my shift in a few minutes away.”

They took shifts keeping watch to make sure that any Dracs didn’t come by and accidentally see them because that had happened a few times and Poison wasn’t in the mood for it to happen ever, ever again. 

There were too many ideas bouncing around in Poison’s head for him to try sleeping, anyway, but he didn’t try to keep Jet up when Jet laid back down. 

It was just him, then, because Kobra got into an odd state when he was keeping watch and it was best not to disturb him.

Poison didn’t want to live like this for the rest of his life. 

He didn’t want to be sleeping in alleys watching his back for the rest of his life, he didn’t want to continue wearing the dirty and stained uniforms that they’d had ever since they escaped. He didn’t want to live like he was always going to be on the run, like he was always going to be a rogue agent of GENERATION NOTHING.

He wasn’t that, he wasn’t. He didn’t want to live like he was and he didn’t want to live like… like Better Living Industries won.

Better Living Industries didn’t have any power over him. Not anymore they didn’t, and they would never again be able to manipulate him. Maybe that was the ramblings of a headstrong twelve-year-old, but a promise was a promise. 

Poison wasn’t sleeping, he was going to make his life better. So he stood up, hopelessly wiped all the gravel off his uniform, told Kobra he was going for a walk, and took off running.

Running, running, running. Poison didn’t like running. But he wanted to… he didn’t know, he wanted to discover something, anything, anything to give meaning to the life he was living, anything to make it worth it.

The only thing he could find was spite. Keep going, keep living, keep running, all out of spite. A raised middle finger to everything Better Living Industries tried to accomplish with him. 

Until, of course, as everything did in his life, everything went horribly wrong.

There was something so out of place about the kid in the dirty clothes and uneven hair with feral, alive, alive, _ alive  _ eyes. Citizens were allowed out of their homes at 5 A.M. sharp, and Poison’s little jog was sometime after five. 

How convenient.

The sirens were screaming, screaming,  _ screaming _ at him. They were screaming at him, weren’t they? 

The loud, blaring, white-flashing sirens that started echoing around the City, loud enough to hurt your ears, loud enough to make Poison curl into a ball, hiding in the nearest alley entrance he could find, knocking over someone’s trash can and not caring in the slightest. He needed to hide hide  _ hide  _ because the sirens were screaming and they were searching and he bet they were searching for him.

Or could they be searching for the others? Searching, searching,  _ searching  _ and eventually  _ finding. _

The paranoia said the sirens had to be for him, for them, they found the group, the escapees, he wasn’t going to be able to outrun him this time and they were going to take him back to - back to - 

Back to GENERATION NOTHING. 

They were all going to get caught and they were going to have to get back because the sirens had found them and they couldn’t escape this time, could they? It would be back to the facility and they’d never see the sky again and and  _ and -  _

Despite his fear, Poison started to take a breath, started to try to think about how many millions of people there were in the city and how unlikely it was that the sirens were for them. The sirens weren’t for him, or for Kobra or Jet or Ghoul or the girl or Cherri.

The sirens weren’t for them, not at all. They couldn’t be. Could they?

It wasn’t about him or the others at all.

“What are you doin’ in the trash, kid?” 

The tears blurring Poison’s eyes and the blaring of the sirens kept him from recognizing that he was the one being spoken too, that he was the one being addressed. 

“I said what the hell are ya doing in the trash?” 

Poison looked up. Still-drying tears covered his face as well as too much snot to be comfortable, fear and paranoia overtaking years of conditioning in a moment of noise.

Too much noise and too little to go with it; the sounds didn’t fit with the surroundings and that had never been something Poison was prepared to deal with. He didn’t need to be prepared, because the life he was supposed to lead was always perfect - everything worked out. 

“I - I - um - I heard the sirens.” All of Poison’s confidence, all of the fake bluster he thought he had dying out. It was hard to fake confidence when he was hiding behind a trash can.

He’d learn how. Everyone did eventually, didn’t they?

“The sirens ain’t got nothin’ on me,” the figure boasted. Years later, Poison would learn that he’d met Mike Milligram, on the day Mike Milligram died. “Kid, don’ let ‘em take anythin’ from you.”

Was Milligram still talking about the sirens? He didn’t know if at the time, Milligram had been drunk on booze or drunk on his own legacy, but either way it was words that’d stick with Poison for years.

And since he hated looking weak, he hated looking like anything other than the colorful version of what he was raised to be, “I...I don’t know what that means.”

“It means get outta that trash can.” Poison was not  _ in  _ the trash can. “And get outta your head. S’how you make a difference, y’know? Go out with a bang?”

“I’m not going to...go out with a bang. I’m not going to go out. Who are you? Why are you talking to me?” In times of complete humiliation, like Poison felt being talked to as he cried behind a trash can in a dingy alley away from all his friends, it was best to get an attitude. To make yourself seem bigger, scarier; make yourself become someone untouchable.

Someone, as Poison would come to learn, like Mike Milligram. 

“Oh, you’re gonna,” Milligram slurred; Poison belatedly realized he was holding a bloody ray gun. Ray guns themselves were relatively simple; they cauterized wounds because they shot out beams of light. How Milligram got blood on a ray gun, Poison didn’t want to know. “Jus’ look at ya. You’re gonna be jus’ like me. I can tell.”

“Shouldn’t you be running?” The sirens were for Milligram, after all. The way Poison could block out sounds after he was focused on anything that wasn’t his own fear was both a talent and a curse. 

A curse only because most of what he learned to tune out was the advice he should be listening to. His talent would make itself even more known soon, right after he met an android girl.

“Shouldn’t you not be here?” Milligram shot back, without much thought because it didn’t make too much sense, especially with the clumsy way it was delivered. 

It was a sloppy testament of a soon-to-be-dead man trying to get his words out into the world before he was hunted like an animal and killed just like one. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be anything special, could it?

Maybe it was just that. Still, the words stuck with Poison more than he’d like to admit. The idea that he was going to be just like that Killjoy, that he was going to be just like Mike Milligram, 

The idea that he was going to be something. The idea that GENERATION NOTHING was part of his past, that it wasn’t something that defined him and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be the only thing left behind.

Yeah, Poison wanted to go out with a bang. He wanted to go out with the same flair for the dramatic as Mike Milligram would in about two hours. It was likely that Poison, some dirty, teary-eyed street kid, was the last person to talk to Mike Milligram while he was still alive.

Poison never told anyone about that encounter.

It was something he wanted to keep close to him. He wanted to take it as an early imprint of destiny; like stealing a glimpse of the future he wanted to have.

He’d turn out so far from Mike Milligram there could barely even be a comparison. He’d turn out to be Party Poison, the killjoy to end all killjoys.

What an ironic turn of phrase, wasn’t it?

Maybe that’s where the other half of Poison’s poor decision-making skills came from, from the recklessness Mike Milligram oozed. Listening to his heart, and that memory, that idea, of Mike Milligram and how he went out.

His heart was the one thing Better Living Industries tried to keep under lock and key. It was what they were afraid of, and Poison knew, somewhere, that he was bound to make sure they should’ve been afraid.

If he was going to prove anything they did right, it would be that. He was a force to be reckoned with. A time-bomb, whatever. More like a loaded gun. And the years in the Desert were like cocking the trigger, weren’t they? 

Killjoys don’t die quiet deaths, that’s what he got from that experience. Poison wasn’t going to die a quiet death if he decided to listen to the rantings of a madman. At the time he hadn’t known Milligram’s name, of course, but he could tell it was a Desert rebel, because they were the only ones who wore colors so obnoxious; they were the ones with the Desert drawl to their words, meant and destined to live out their lives with the sun as their closest companion.

Poison wanted to be like that Killjoy.

He wanted to be able to walk around Battery City and know it wasn’t his home; he wanted to be able to see all the monochrome the city had to offer and say he’d never seen anything quite as repulsive as the lack of color coating the high rises. 

It was a twist of fate; his impulsive suggestion of going to the Desert and the appearance - and death - of Mike Milligram. 

It was a twist of fate that maybe shouldn’t have happened, because when Poison was determined, he didn’t stop until he got what he wanted. He learned that young.

He’d gotten himself and four others out of a facility they’d never left before. He could get them out of a city they’d never left before, right? 

When the sirens stopped blaring, hours had passed, and Poison had made up his mind. He was going to go out to the Desert, and the others were going to go with him. 

They would make good killjoys, he knew it. The City wasn’t where any of them were meant to be - he remembered the way Kobra used to stare at the walls of Battery City longingly, like he was struggling to picture what was beyond other than it had to be better than here. He remembered the way Jet would tug at his hair like he hated how short it had to be, even when they were back in the facility.

The one good thing that had come out of being in GENERATION NOTHING was that Poison and the others had never had the pills everyone in the desert seemed to resent. And the only ones who would take pills were those (Jet and Ghoul) that would decide to take up Pony’s offer of yet another Zone Five party, and Kobra, who needed to take his anti-depressants. 

Well, there was that issue with the water supply in Zone Two, but that was a completely different story; a story that Poison was about two years too early for, then. 

The Desert had to be better than the City, because the Desert had color and people - rebels - like Mike Milligram.

Poison didn’t go back to the others. No, he was preoccupied, even though he knew they had to be worried about how long he’d been gone. Oh, well, Kobra would start doing the same thing in a few years. 

See, in the two months of warped freedom he’d had, he hadn’t had the chance to explore the Lobby all too much. What he knew it as, was the epicenter of everything rebellion that happened in Battery City. If you ever thought of rebellion, of going against the norms Battery City set in place so rigidly, you went to the Lobby.

It was high time Poison paid a visit there, then, wasn’t it? 

_

Considering Poison was in the Boron District, it took about two hours of walking to reach the outsides of the Neon District - more accurately, the Lobby, but that wasn’t it’s official name. 

It didn’t help that Poison kept getting lost. Part of him resented Better Living for that, but maybe that one was because he hated that he was treated like a caged animal that didn’t deserve to be able to roam its enclosure. 

By the time he stumbled beyond the border of whatever-the-hell-district he was just in, marked by a foot-wide black line down the street, Poison was dead exhausted on his feet from both walking and overthinking.

He immediately knew he made the right decision, though.

The Lobby didn’t hide it’s rebellion, unlike the other slum districts. There was no bleed-over into the district he was just in. It was all confined to one area, like a bomb; from the centimeter the district-marker stopped, graffiti bloomed.

Whatever he was looking at was a large, building-spanning piece, and like many other things that happened that day, it helped shape Poison in a way he wouldn’t realize for a long time.

Near the district borders, it was all black-and-white spray paint; it gave the illusion of an outline of...Battery City? Yeah, it had the Tower in the center, that was Battery City.

As the piece went on, spanning both across the buildings it passed and the ground it covered, it went from the pristine and monochrome Battery City to yellow-and-red ruins, like… a mushroom cloud? A bomb and people running for their lives with more on the way, and they were all racing toward the city, becoming smaller and smaller in perspective. 

At the very end of the piece - Poison realized belatedly that he was looking at it backward and that was why it took him so long to realize that it was the bombs happening before the people ran to Batt City - there were purple and blue clouds, with splatters of white paint to mimic stars, a picture of serenity before the bombs.

Poison never saw that particular piece of graffiti again, but it was the message that stayed in his heart for years. The Desert was peaceful, a place of haven, before Battery City bombed them. Until they made the Zones into the wasteland Poison had always been told they were.

Learning about history wasn’t something Poison had ever wanted to do, but after seeing that art piece, after staring at it trying to figure out what story it was telling, Poison sat down and learned and listened to any type of history he could find.

He talked to the first droid he could find, - droid or person, it didn’t matter, but it was a droid he found - asking about what happened before his lifetime, about what happened in the Lobby, about the things Battery City did, about the Helium Wars. About any questions that came to mind.

The droid, a lovely girl with a nice smile and synthetic red hair, who told Poison to call her Red, seemed overwhelmed at his questions - confused, even. But she smiled, pushing her hair behind her ear, and sat cross-legged on her cape, using it as a barrier between her boots and the ground. “You’re… here to ask about history?”

Poison, young and naive as he would stay for a little while longer, nodded eagerly, sitting cross-legged next to her. “Yeah! D’ya know anything?” 

She regarded him for a second, analyzing him, debating who he was and what he wanted, but at the time Poison wasn’t able to recognize that, too caught up in the idea that he didn’t have to be clueless and in the dark any longer. “Got anything you particularly want to know about?” 

“What happened during the Helium Wars?” That was a big question he had - He’d been told about the Helium Wars when he was in training, but his instructors always glossed over them, made it seem insignificant. Poison knew it couldn’t be unimportant if it had a capitalized name and was plural. 

Red laughed, softly. She had a nice laugh and a nice smile; Poison wondered why she was done in the Lobby, then. “A lot happened. That’s what caused Battery City to rise up, y’know?” 

No, Poison didn’t know. But the idea of a history lesson in some corner of the Lobby was enticing, and he wanted to know more. He instinctively leaned toward her, eager to hear what she had to say. “How did that happen?” 

“There used to be a lot more people in the world,” Red sighed, avoiding Poison’s gaze. She seemed to debate with herself for a moment before reaching into the sloppily home-sewn pocket on her cape, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it with the flick of her… pinky? “A lot. Billions, they say. But jus’ like always, it dissolved into war. So many people died.” 

“But how did that create Batt City? And how can you smoke…?” Poison wasn’t very versed in how to talk to droids, okay! He knew virtually nothing about them, and Red seemed friendly, and he wanted to learn.

This was back when he was open to learning, open to hear about everything that happened in the world. Back when he didn’t know how bad things could be, when he was eager to know everything, no matter how bad.

Red laughed again, exhaling smoke that she waved away from Poison’s face. “You haven’t been around many ‘droids, have you? How old are you?”

“twelve,” Poison said, looking at her and daring her to laugh. He was lying; he knew when his birthday was and he knew that he’d be twelve in about eight months. If she did, he didn’t think he’d be all that mad, but she didn’t, so he’d never know. “And no. I haven’t.”

“Alright, then I’ll excuse the questions. I’ve got functionin’ lungs too. Need ‘em for my job.”

“Your job…?” Poison knew about the androids BLI made, but he had a feeling that he wasn’t given the actual scope of why, considering he’d been spat nothing but propaganda for years.

That was why he wanted to know everything. To make up for all the time he didn’t know anything, he wanted to know everything.

They couldn’t take the knowledge in his head, right? 

Red sighed again. Poison didn’t think she should sigh that much; she was nice and he didn’t like to think how burdened she must feel, considering they were sitting on a corner of the dirtiest, worst district in the city. “I feel bad for tellin’ you, but you’ll learn anyway, sometime. I’m a pornodroid. A ‘droid designed by the city for sex, each a different hair color dependin’ on what ya want.”

“They...make you for sex?” Mind Poison for being incredulous. Who would take technology like that, the technology to make another being with conscious thinking, and use it for something as shallow as that?

Red shrugged. If she was upset by Poison’s bluntness, she didn’t show it. “They take 50% of all the carbons we make. It gets ‘em revenue, so who cares ‘bout the droids themselves, right?” 

Poison did. Red seemed nice. She didn’t… No one deserved that, he didn’t think. To know from when you’re created that you were made by and for someone else’s profit. “Does… No one help you? Are you just out on the streets?”

“My friend Blue keeps me company. You’re a little young to be asking about this, aren’t you?” 

Poison was young. At the time he still had baby fat on his cheeks, still had dimples on his stupid chubby cheeks, that he couldn’t get to go away with any amount of training. “Maybe. You never answered my questions about the City, though.” 

Even if it killed him, Poison decided then and there he was going to do something about the treatment of droids in the City. He still had a lot left to learn, and he knew that; there had to be something that kept the droids from simply revolting. Poison just had to figure out what it was.

The Helium Wars were a more straightforward topic to him, though he was quickly learning history wasn’t all black-and-white.

Red blew out another puff of smoke. “Right. The Helium Wars. Well, Battery City was almost built outta the rubble of some old city, Los somethin’ or other. The issue was, no one really saw the potential, or the progress. Suicide rates were high - the highest they’ve ever been, I think.” 

“Suicide rates?”

“The rate at which people killed themselves out of grief,” Red explained, a sorry expression hanging heavy on her face. “It was a... dark time for everyone, after the Helium Wars. Back then it wasn’t this bad.”

It was difficult to imagine someone killing themself for any reason that wasn’t because they were about to get captured. At least, that was what Poison was taught to believe.

And in the next few years, he’d get well acquainted with the concept, because of his own brother. But that hadn’t started yet, and that wouldn’t start for a while. 

Instead of admitting to his struggle comprehending, Poison nodded slowly, like he was actually understanding what Red was telling him. “So...How did Better Living become a thing?” 

He didn’t know if he actually expected her to know the answer, but Red inhaled a huff of smoke, gestured for Poison to wait until she was finished, then spoke. “Oh, they were the ones who built Battery City. They teach that in every high school - you a drop-out? Anyway, they built the City. Originally they had good intentions.”

“Originally?”

“Do I have to explain why they ain’t that pure anymore?” 

Oh. That was fair play. Then, Poison asked a question he didn’t expect an answer to, completely impulsive and dumb. Don’t tell strangers personal secrets. “Do you know about a project called GENERATION NOTHING?” 

Red raised a perfectly sculpted brow at him. “Just how do you know about that, kid?” 

“Humor me.” Don’t press, don't press don’t press. Poison wasn’t the best liar, not by then. 

Shaking her head, Red obliged. “Fine. If you really wanna know ‘bout a project like that, I advise ya to go to someone out in tha’ Desert by the name’a Newsagogo. She’ll know.”

There were more questions on the tip of Poison’s tongue, but he didn’t ask any of them. He thought he’d bothered Red enough - from what he heard, and as much as it made his blood boil, she had a job to get back to.

Maybe that was why she looked so confused when he started asking history questions. Because the questions he was asking were about the Helium Wars and Better Living Industries, not prices. 

Maybe he needed to get back to the others and leave the Lobby before he did anything he’d regret. It was a miracle he managed to not make any bad decisions on the way, because it was tempting. 

He didn’t like what he’d found out. It remembered him of a saying he’d found in a torn-out page of a book he’d found crumpled up in the trash a few days again - the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Better Living Industries started off with good intentions, Red said. 

Poison didn’t know what to think of that. How could something like this - this all-powerful company he’d been trapped under have started off good? 

Was it all-powerful? 

Or did Poison just think that because he was used to being under their thumb, only knowing anything other than the smiley face logo when he escaped?

From what he’d heard from Red, they were a powerful company, but…

Poison decided then and there that he wasn’t going to give some company all of his fear. They raised him; it was time they reap what they sow. 

They weren’t going to get his fear. They weren’t going to get him, either, because as he stuffed his hands in his dirty uniform pockets, glaring at the ground, he realized he needed to go on his adventure, he needed to be able to make himself confident enough to think that Better Living couldn’t ever hurt him again. 

He needed to find a way to become bulletproof.

While there was chaos in the rest of the city, - the ever-present vandalism in the Lobby, the repair crews assessing the damage Mike Milligram created, the coroner announcing time of death - arguably the most dangerous thing was the teenager with a cracking voice promising himself that he’d find a way out to the Desert. 

If anything, to find Newsagogo. But if he was being honest with himself, it was to see the sun.

The sun, unfiltered and uncontained. 

Poison had always liked the sky; there was a reason that they’d all taken a moment outside of the facility they’d lived in all their lives to admire the sky, of all things. Escaping to the Desert would be like seeing it all over again. 

Seeing it the way it was meant to be seen. 

_

“We’re going to the Zones,” Poison said simply when he got back, dropping onto the ground to sit in front of Ghoul. 

Cherri and the girl weren’t back yet, despite how much time had passed since the last time Poison had seen the others. 

Ghoul looked at him with no real concern in his gaze. “Are we now? Where’d you get that idea?” 

“From the android girl I just talked to. I want to go to the Zones, so we’re going to the Zones!” Being the leader of their escape attempt, the idea that people wouldn’t blindly follow Poison hadn’t sunk in yet. 

It would never sink in, if only because people would blindly follow him because of the passion that spewed from every word he said. 

“None of us want to go to the Zones.”

“Did I ask for your input, Cherri?” Poison said without looking behind him. Whenever another voice startled him, it was almost always the smooth drawl of Cherri Cola finally adding input. 

It was the girl who added her input next. Poison always regretted not listening to her that day. Maybe it would’ve saved her, if no one else. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, either. We aren’t prepared for it and I hear escaping the City is hell on even experienced Juvee’s.” 

“That’s not what I’ve heard,” Poison argued, crossing his arms. It was less determination and more spite now, why he was determined to get everyone else out. 

“Then you’ve heard wrong!”

“Look,” Poison glared, and that was the first time he can remember that he actually acted like a leader, if an indignant one. Their escape didn’t count because they all wanted to escape anyway. “I said we’re going out to the Desert. If you don’t want to join me, fuckin’ fine. You’re never here anyway. But me - I’m going out to the Zones!”

The silence that greeted him wasn’t entirely unexpected; no one wanted to interrupt the glaring between Poison and the girl. 

Cherri mumbled, stiffly, but when everyone’s gaze snapped to him, he repeated himself. “I...Um, I think we should wait on goin’ to the Desert, too…” 

“Then you can stay with her,” Poison snapped, daring anyone to say anything else. To say they were staring. 

It was an odd thing, that Poison still can’t quite explain. They were all raised the exact same way; they’d all been at the mercy of the others’ anger when the cameras weren’t watching them. 

But when she flipped Poison off and turned on her heel, - the last time Poison would ever see her alive - no one stopped her. Cherri took one last glance at the rest of them, and turned his back on them too.

The next time Poison would see him, it’d be Agent Cherri Cola, and she would be dead. 

Poison turned to the others, still sitting there slack-jawed. “Don’t - don’t even say whatever the Hell you’re thinking. We’re going out to the Desert. I need to find someone.” 

Jet nodded, slowly, gathering the blanket next to him into his lap, gripping it tightly. Jet’s comfort blanket; something Kobra had stolen for him a month prior. “When do we leave?”

“As soon as we can.” Poison didn’t know how difficult it would be to get to the Zones, but he knew it wasn’t going to be like a walk in the park smuggling four people out of Battery City without getting shot and killed.

Both the advantage and the disadvantage they had was their training. On one hand, they were all still short and tiny and could run and fight, but on the other hand, should they get caught… Poison didn’t know whether BLI would rather have them executed or take them back to that facility.

The nightmares about that place had started for Poison by then - he wasn’t sure about the others, but if anyone tried to take him back to that facility he would’ve rather used his nails to slit his own wrists. 

Go to the Desert, or get captured. That’s what it had become to Poison. Part of it was that answers were out in the Desert - answers to whatever the hell GENERATION NOTHING was supposed to be, answers to what the sun looked like. 

“I don’t want to go,” Kobra mumbled. Kobra was sitting alone, farther away from the group. Detached, with his knees pulled up to his chest.

Poison routinely forgot how young he was, despite how it would take so long to stop calling Kobra his baby brother. “Why not?” Poison asked softly. 

Neither Jet or Ghoul commented on how soft Poison asked with Kobra, especially in moments like those when it was clear that was exactly what Kobra wanted. Kobra wasn’t sniffling, wasn’t crying. Just staring, blank but unafraid. “I don’ wanna leave the City. We just got out here.” 

“The Desert has lizards.” 

“What’s a lizard?” 

Oh, fuck. Poison hadn’t known what a lizard was, he just heard it from someone else. “Um...Uh… A Desert animal. They’ll like you. You’re jus’ like them!”

Poison didn’t know what the intended effect was, but Kobra smiled. Not really, but it was a bit of a smile - later, that would become the Kobra equivalent of a full-blown grin. “I - I guess...we’ll see?” 

_ We’ll see. _ That was Kobra’s permission, if reluctance, to go out to the Desert. Poison wasn’t and never would be fully convinced that Kobra wanted to go out to the Desert in the first place, but he knew that Kobra would never want to go back to the City once they were there.

“Is there anyone we have to know? Supplies we should bring?”

Whatever the answer to that should’ve been, Poison didn’t know it. All he knew was that he had to get out to the Desert, not how he was supposed to get out there. He didn’t think ahead a lot. “We’ll figure it out, okay? We need’ta find a way out of here, first off.” 

_

As it turned out, finding a way out of Battery City wasn’t too hard, but getting out of it would be.

According to the droid Poison had talked to, and the database Kobra hacked, much to the surprise of the others, the Lobby had tunnels underneath the City that they could use.

Except the entrances of the tunnels were built before BLI put security in that particular corner of the Lobby.

And, say, before BLI made their district police station right above said tunnels. 

It was a catch twenty-two, wasn’t it? To escape the City, they had to go into the clutches of those they so loathed.

Maybe the catch twenty-two they’d found themselves in would’ve ended better had anyone, anyone that wasn’t Poison made the plan.

“The plan is simple!” Poison grinned, proud and full of himself, because of course he would be. He came up with what he assumed was a foolproof plan to get them all out of the City. 

It was not foolproof in the slightest.

“We get arrested.”

The other three stared at him blankly. Even Kobra, who usually went along with the dumb plans he made because they sometimes, sometimes worked. 

“I mean, think about it!” Poison continued, determined to make the others understand that this was their best course of action and he didn’t need the help of Cherri and the girl. “What better way to get access to the police station ‘n the tunnels?” 

Poison wished that anyone had made any other suggestions. 

But no one spoke, so Poison’s idiotic plan was set into stone. “Alright, is everyone ready to get arrested?”

“Don’t we need to be able to take supplies out to the Zones? It is a Desert,” Ghoul pointed out, just seconds too late. Any moment earlier and Poison would’ve been open to hearing different ideas, but Ghoul had to wait and Poison had to be cocky. 

“We know how to survive,” Poison said confidently. “We got this. We need a change of clothes, though, ‘else they might recognize us.”

“Might?” Jet murmured, too quiet for anyone but Poison to hear, and Jet was completely right, but none of them knew that, not yet. 

“C’mon. Stop stressin’ ‘n might something you can wear that’s...y’know, not a dirty white jumpsuit!” Poison wanted them to stop talking so they didn’t make him question himself.

He should’ve been questioning himself.

At least, he should’ve been questioning himself more than he had been when he and the others split up, with Kobra attached at his side, like a lost puppy looking for a home.

Poison was looking for a home, too. He didn’t know that was why he was so certain that his plan was work, that the craving for somewhere he could call his home, was the reason he was so adamant that they needed to go out to the Desert beyond finding Newsagogo; yet another objective he hadn’t told his friends about.

Poison wanted a place to call home that he could say Better Living Industries had never and would never touch. Something they couldn’t corrupt with their ideals that they could train children to be soldiers for an experiment that no one was allowed to know about. 

“Hey, Kobes, it’s gonna be fine, okay?” Poison had whispered, gently shoving Kobra’s shoulder and giving a wobbly grin. He even used the nickname that spawned from Kobra’s old name, the one he had before Kobra that no one remembered and no one was allowed to remember. 

That was before Poison had ever called Kobra little Destroya, long before it was ever relevant.

In a way, Poison missed that moment; wished he would have captured it in a Polaroid to keep on the dash of the Trans Am he’d never heard of at that time. When it was just them, with a combined dream to take with them. 

It wouldn’t stay that way for long.

But right then, with Kobra by his side, Poison’s biggest priority was carrying out a plan that would never work and stealing clothes from some poor Lobby resident.

Lobby residents didn’t have much; that was why it became an epicenter of rebellion and color. Not just because it was aptly named the neon district, in relation to the element on the periodic table rather than the color organizer. 

The Neon District became the Lobby because no one made enough carbons per year to pay for more than a crappy apartment on the East Side, in the slum district the authorities didn’t like to talk about but loved to raid.

Poison didn’t know that back then. 

He knew that the Lobby was where the rebellion took place, he knew that the Lobby was where the android girls and the tunnels were. He didn’t know that the android girls were only there because the City forced them to be; told them that they didn’t belong with the middle class.

Didn’t deserve to be seen as people, when they processed the same information, the same sights, the same emotions that the City itself supplied to them.

None of this was common knowledge to Poison; all he knew was what Red had told him, even if he thought that she glossed over a few things in an effort to preserve the spark in his eyes of naivety; one that he wouldn’t keep for long.

All he knew was that he wanted to fight for something. He could fight for something, he could fight for what he believed in. 

He could fight for an opinion that he was allowed to form by himself. An opinion that wasn’t influenced by Battery City, an opinion that wasn’t force-fed to him through blacked-out textbooks and holograms of events told in a way that left out years of anything. 

Like they were blank; like nothing happened. Like they were perfect.

Would you destroy something perfect in order to make it beautiful?

The first time Poison thought that was when he was walking with Kobra, kicking up gravel and thinking about the day’s events. It was a thought that would come back to haunt him, no matter how many riots he caused or firefights he finished or dumb brother antics that he stopped.

Would you? Destroy something perfect in order to make it beautiful, that is. 

Poison didn’t know the answer back then, and he didn’t want to know the answer, because by the time he thought about what his answer should be, Kobra was tugging him along. 

“Look, look, Pois, look!” Kobra told him, ushering him forward, running, - and tumbling, in Kobra’s case, but he did get up valiantly and ignored the blood dripping from his lip -, running, running, running, though Poison didn’t know why or where they were running toward.

Poison didn’t realize why Kobra was running until Poison’s shoulder slammed into someone, but Kobra was still pulling him forward, ignoring the rocks Poison tripped over in an effort to  _ rush rush rush _ . 

Then Kobra was….laughing, as he pulled Poison around a corner. 

Poison slammed into Kobra, disoriented and confused, before realizing Kobra was laughing because of the clothes he was holding. 

Two shirts. 

The person Poison had slammed into was the person Kobra had stolen them from. 

It wasn’t anywhere near the level of skill as a pickpocket Kobra would earn - a run-and-grab like that - but it was the first time either of them had stolen anything, even in the two months of freedom they’d had.

“Really?” Poison asked, but he was smiling, too. Kobra was happy, and that would happen so rarely that his smile could light up the universe in the blink of an eye.

It was contagious. 

Kobra nodded, with a look of pride in his eye. It was such a shame that it would take Poison years to learn how to say  _ I’m proud of you, _ wasn’t it? “You said we needed different clothes.”

“But I didn’t say…” He didn’t say steal them? That was a lie. There was always the implication that, yes, they would have to steal whatever they needed. Usually it was Cherri and the girl who did all the stealing, but they weren’t there, were they? 

Instead of finishing his sentence, Poison shook his head with a grin, and took one of the shirts with no further question. 

Poison  _ still  _ remembers how stupidly tight that gray plaid shirt was and how much he hated it. It was even  _ worse  _ because Kobra’s shirt was too big on him, but he refused to switch.

It was best to assume their luck had run out after they found said shirts, so Poison and Kobra put them on over the dirty white uniforms. Better to at least semi-fit in; it was enough of a deviation. It had to be. 

Naturally, it wasn’t, but they didn’t know that yet. 

“How are we going to make sure that we all get put in the same place when we’re arrested? And...you know, that we’re in the right place in the police station in the first place?” Kobra asked, a few minutes after they’d regrouped with Jet and Ghoul, who were both sporting new, just as dirty, clothes, with a backpack on Jet’s back he hadn’t had before. 

You win some, you lose some, right? Besides, they’d all get accustomed to wearing dirty clothes eventually. 

“We hope!” said Poison, too cheerfully, too confident, even with the voice in the back of his head telling him to rethink the plan, rethink it,  _ rethink it! _

“That doesn’t sound like the most reliable plan…”

“And we’ll see if I’m an idiot who gets us all killed. It’ll be fine, Jet! You know it has to be - We’re good at getting into trouble and we’re good at getting ourselves out of it, aren’t we?” And what examples did Poison have of that? 

Two. So reliable, right?

He had to stop second-guessing himself. Poison wishes he would’ve rethought everything. Maybe then it would’ve played out like Poison had planned, had hoped. 

“So far,” Ghoul muttered, shaking his head, but Poison was too confident to realize that if everyone else thought he was crazy for the ridiculous plan he came up with, then maybe he was.

It was something that would take him his brother’s broken leg and Ghoul’s mouth split open to learn. Some things come with a lesson.

This was not his lesson. Not yet. Poison always had been too stubborn for his own good. 

The second part of the plan: getting arrested. 

It was the Lobby - getting arrested didn’t take that long. Of course, it didn’t, not when Poison and the rest of his soon-to-be crew were dirty, rebellious, and wanted.

Not that they knew that. They didn’t know a lot of things - a lot of crucial information, both because it was impossible to access and because not all of them were being completely truthful. It wasn’t just Poison, either, as he’d come to learn. 

“So...Does anyone actually know where the patrols are supposed to be right now?” It wasn’t enough to assume they’d get caught while existing with the general populace. They’d lived undetected within the alleys and abandoned buildings of Battery City for months; if it was that easy to get caught, the reckless group of children would’ve been caught long before then. 

Ghoul shrugged. 

Poison would’ve suggested finding somewhere public, somewhere with a lot of people, somewhere there were bound to be Draculoids and cops roaming about. 

But his suggestion died in his throat somewhere between Ghoul starting to slam anything that could be shattered against one of the brickwalls in the alley they were in, and when Kobra joined in.

Poison sent Jet an incredulous look,  _ stop them! _ , but Jet shrugged, and picked up a Juice can off the ground to throw it at the wall. 

The ruckus they were making was bound to draw attention. It was too loud and they clearly weren’t law-abiding citizens, but it wasn’t...exactly how Poison pictured getting arrested for the first time.

Considering most of his life he’d assumed he’d be the one doing the arresting, it was a mental shock if anything.

Then he shrugged, and joined the other three. Why not? Besides, he was twelve and there wasn’t anything quite as calming as throwing breakable items out of anger and malice for the system. 

He  _ deserved  _ to be angry, didn’t he? He  _ deserved  _ the right to all the emotions a human could experience, and anger was one of them. 

One day, he’d know the full range. From elation to grief so strong he could barely open his eyes. From anger to suicidal ideation.

One day. 

It didn’t take them long to attract attention, because at some point it became a game - who could create the most noise, the most chaos, out of random things they found on the alley ground? 

They deserved the happiness, the calm before the hurricane. 

And their reality came crashing down when they accomplished their goal. Blocking out the porchlight from across the street was a starchy white uniform and a poorly executed vampiric mask.

Dracs. And Dracs never came alone.

Except it wasn’t Dracs; it was a mixture of about ten Dracs and about ten cops - the difference was who was dressed in white and who was dressed in black.

Poison didn’t know why there were so many. From what he knew, that wasn’t standard protocol. It was like he’d forgotten when they were all on the run, what they were raised to do.

How valuable they had to be; what kind of important assets the child soldiers could grow up to be. How much would the populace fear a perfect soldier? 

A soldier that grew up right under their noses, only unveiled after they were tested, perfect, and shaped to be exactly what they were supposed to be and nothing more.

More important than the average agent, but just as disposable. A face to a name that didn’t matter, that would only be used to strike fear into the people.

Oh, how easy it was to forget your past at the moment it truly mattered. 

Poison snarled at the approaching figures, as the last Juice can thrown by Kobra hit the ground. 

They meant to be taken in, to be brought to the police station. Of course none of them fought back; that was the intention, wasn’t it?

To avoid suspicion, Poison threw a few punches, kicked out at a few others, and he hoped the others did the same. 

Not that they would’ve stood a chance anyway. Not that they would’ve survived whether they thought they could win or not. 

Disposable, remember? Liabilities and loose ends that needed taken care of, at that point. Either tie up the loose strings or bring them back, make them  _ Better  _ than they were before. Bleach their minds to forget all of their out-of-facility memories. 

Their memories of the sky.

But Poison, Poison wasn’t scared of that. Too arrogant, too cocky. Too certain that they wouldn’t recognize him, and that he wasn’t a wanted child.

He should’ve been scared of that. And the fear only started to set in after the police station came into view - and the van the four of them were shoved into turned away. 

Turned away. They weren’t going to the police station.

Kobra was looking at Poison wide-eyed; they all were. The police station faded out of view of the small windows in the door of the white van.

Poison didn’t know what to do. Was he supposed to break them all out - how could he even attempt to do that? He didn’t have the strength!

Or the wits. Poison didn’t have the wits to do that, did he? 

He couldn’t. Poison couldn’t be their savior. Poison wasn’t ready to be their savior. 

The defeat only set in when he realized how much hope was in Kobra’s gaze - Kobra, the little brother he’d always had but had never been allowed to get close to. The agents had told him Kobra and him were related, but because they were in different training levels it didn’t matter, did it? 

They were in different training levels. If they weren’t related, he never would’ve entertained the thought of bringing Kobra with him when he and the others escaped.

If it wasn’t for their relation, Kobra wouldn’t be in danger of going back with the knowledge of what the sky looks like. You can’t go back to the type of life they led after you’ve seen the sky, free of all responsibility other than  _ running. _

Poison couldn’t manage another escape. And maybe the defeat shown in his eyes, because it wasn’t him who snarled.

“I’m not going back,” Ghoul said, looking at all of them with a determination Poison couldn’t hope to rival, not then. “I’m not fucking going back!”

Poison glanced nervously toward the driver area, but no one was looking back. 

_ SNAP. _

Ghoul’s flipping the drivers off. 

Ghoul’s  _ flipping the drivers off. _

Because Ghoul doesn’t have  _ handcuffs _ on. Because the  _ snap _ was Ghoul’s handcuffs. 

“Stop starin’ at me, I’ll tell ya later,” Ghoul shrugged, a mischievous grin at the dumbfounded expressions he was receiving. “Move so I can get ta your hands, yeah?”

Poison was too busy gaping to make any comments; instead, he leaned forward absentmindedly, and with another  _ snap,  _ Ghoul crushes the relatively thin metal of the handcuffs. 

By the time Ghoul finishes helping Jet and Kobra with their handcuffs, Poison’s trying to jimmy the lock on the back of the van, something, anything, to get them out of what could end up being a death sentence. 

“The screw!” Kobra grinned, like he’d figured out the secret to immortality and at that moment, it was the secret to immortality.

For a moment, it made no sense. The screw? The screw to what?

Then Poison realized - the hinge of the door. The hinge of the door! If they could break both hinges of one of the van doors, then they’d be home-free - wherever home may be. 

Poison looked to Ghoul with a look akin to pure hope - Ghoul was able to get their handcuffs off, somehow, he’d explain later, so he should be able to get the hinge to the door off, right? It’s not like anyone was going to get lucky and find a bottlecap perfectly suited to twisting screws.

Ghoul took a deep breath, glanced back toward the somehow oblivious drivers, - it was a Witch’s miracle no one had noticed the freed prisoners in the back, or else they’d have been ghosted without a doubt - sighed, and smashed his palm into the top hinge of one of the doors.

That caused a ruckus. The drivers noticed that from the swerve, from how Ghoul was thrown to the other side of the van with a painful crash.

Poison spent his string of curses as he and Kobra helped Ghoul get up and get his bearings again, although the entire left side of Ghoul’s face was red and angry and a few scratches were going to start bleeding, 

“Jet, Kobra, cover!” Poison told them, turning Kobra around by his shoulders because Kobra always did need to be redirected.

It was comical, the way Kobra and Jet tried mostly to block the drivers’ view of them while Ghoul struggled to get the hinge at the top of the door completely off.

When he did, he didn’t bother trying to get the other hinge off - instead, he pushed forward until the door itself broke off, screeching against the pavement of the ground while Poison barely caught Ghoul from falling out by his collar. 

“C’mon!” Ghoul shouted, waiting until the van swerved again, hitting a street sign but slowing down momentarily. 

Ghoul’s hand was interlocked with Poison’s, as was Poison’s with Jet and Jet’s with Kobra. It was comical to think about, because they were just children, and Poison would  _ definitely _ pay to see that. 

And, naturally, it was less of a jump and more of them falling out one-by-one because of another dump in the road, getting road rash on their faces and elbows and bruises from landing on each other.

But they weren’t in the back of a van anymore. 

They weren’t in the back of a van heading toward certain doom anymore, and that’s why Poison started laughing.

He’d busted his face on the concrete when he fell, too unlucky to land on Ghoul, and the blood spurting from his nose would matter in a minute, as would the chip in his tooth, but it was fine. It was fine, it was okay, and honestly, it was kind of hilarious.

Even Kobra was laughing. 

Kobra didn’t laugh too much. And the way his nose scrunched up so unfamiliar with the concept of laughing made Poison laugh even more, and it was just four not-teenagers laying in the road, covered in scrapes.

Their journey wasn’t over yet. 

The van was going to come squealing back in less than a minute. Another patrol of cops and Dracs were going to come circling back and try to take them again.

Didn’t they deserve a moment of laughter? A moment of laughter in a lifetime of soon-to-be sorrows? A moment of laughter when they were all damn near okay? 

“Hey Pois, try to keep smilin’, right?” Jet grinned, pointing out one of the BLI billboards sitting on top of a rundown apartment close to them. 

So Poison plastered on the widest, most obnoxious smile he could, his teeth painted red with the dripping blood from his nose, but there was so much going on that he wasn’t registering it. 

Then he heard sirens.

And those sirens were most definitely for them - there was no doubt about that. 

There was no Mike Milligram around to give him prophecies of his own death and no Red to tell him the reality in front of him with a puff of smoke. It was him and Jet, Kobra, Ghoul.

They could be killed.

That’s when it really hit Poison - they could die. They wouldn’t be Bleached, they were too much trouble.

The Dracs could set their ray guns to kill and that would be it. That would be it, and the Fabulous Killjoys would never happen; Poison would never get to the Desert, would never get to see the sky.

His little brother would never get to see the sky. 

Ghoul would never be able to see the clouds.

Jet would never be able to be the stars.

The sobering of their laughter didn’t register with Poison. He beckoned them all to get up, even with how the soreness was already settling into their bones from their painful tumble. 

There wasn’t going to be an easy getaway this time. It wasn’t going to be running.

Well, it would involve running. Everything came back to running - running, running, running until they were actually exhausted and could barely get up when they tripped. 

Before they could run, though, they had to stand, because there was no alley they could run too that would keep them from getting caught.

Maybe trying to fight when they had no advantage, no element that could be used to turn the scales, was pointless. Maybe they would all die anyway.

They wouldn’t, but they didn’t know that. It was better to try, to try to fight rather than die helplessly after already getting themselves out of what Poison deemed a hopeless situation.

“Anyone happen to have any magical destruction powers?” Kobra asked blandly, but there was something in his eyes that was just as determined as the rest of them, if more so. The Kobra Kid was beginning to bloom underneath the mousy brown hair covered in both grease and dirt.

In the following years, it would retain the grease and the dirt, it’d just be blond.

“The closest we got is Ghoul,” Jet shrugged. Their deaths’ could be imminent, but why think about that? Why think about how the sirens made them need to shout? How they had less than a minute until Hell was unleashed? 

Ironically, Ghoul had never built a bomb by then. He’d studied it; the next course he had in training was with Jet, and would be mechanics-geared, but they didn’t exactly stick around long enough to take it. 

The closest they had to a weapon was themselves. And they were a twelve-year-old, a ten-year-old, a twelve-year-old, and another twelve-year-old. The odds were most certainly not in their favor. 

The van was coming back. The patrols were in police cars and they were coming into view, too. 

Time to shine. 

_ Killjoys, make some noise! _ as their battle call would become. 

The magic of friendship couldn’t save them (this time), but being small and generally raised to fight - though not fight the system - was what kept them alive.

It started with a white ray gun blast that barely missed Poison’s head.

They all stood in shock, staring at Poison. Somehow, in the last two months, they’d become unfamiliar with being shot at. 

In two months, it had become commonplace to sleep on the ground with gravel digging into their sides. But then, that moment, it was like it had never happened at all.

It was like training all over again, except he didn’t know if these ray guns were on stun or kill, except there were cops and the terrain was unfamiliar.

Training was training. 

First, and they all did this in their own way, assess the situation.

Unfavorable odds Three cop cars, one broken-down Drac van, two usable Drac vans. Approximately sixteen people in total. 

Approximately seven shooting at them. The two Dracs on the left had the worst aim, hitting the wall seven feet away from where Poison had ran, away from the others.

Those two Dracs would be easiest to take out. 

The others were better shots, but seemed to be torn between aiming at Poison, Kobra, Jet or Ghoul, because they’d all split. 

They tilted their heads ever-so-slightly - that meant they were receiving orders. That meant that in a second, the order could go from capture alive to keep it clean.

Not Poison’s favorite thing to think about. It meant that they were more of a hivemind, though - that was good for Poison and the others.

Assessment of the situation - done. 

Second, formulate a plan. 

The two Dracs on the left would be easiest to take out, but Poison didn’t have a ray gun of his own. 

He didn’t have a ray gun, but he wasn’t the one closest to the Dracs, either.

The closest to the squad of authority blocking one side of the road leading to the police station, - not the other, not yet - was Kobra. Kobra, who was small. And quiet, like a mouse.

Kobra, who’d ran behind the nearest cardboard street sign, barely large enough to cover his frame.

That didn’t matter, though. The mix of authorities knew that Kobra was there, but all their attention was on the older kids. The immediate threats, easiest to notice.

Oh, that was a bad decision. Kobra had always been ahead of his classes, too smart for his own good. 

Poison held up two fingers and gestured twice to the left, then pointed a finger toward Kobra and gestured up.

He didn’t even know if Kobra saw him or not, too preoccupied with ducking immediately after from the blast that would’ve taken out his throat. 

The rest of them had to avoid getting shot while Kobra attempted to quietly disarm the two Dracs. You know, while they were next to the other fourteen authoritative people trying to shoot them. Yeah, perfect job for the ten-year-old, right? 

Poison was lucky that he found something to take his mind off it; he found a glass bottle on the ground. Looked like it used to be some type of booze, but it was heavy and glass and the label was too faded for Poison to care. He’d wished it was some sort of ironic pun, though. 

It was difficult to not look over to Kobra. He wanted to look over to Kobra, see how he was faring, but he was afraid of drawing attention to what was going on in his make-shift plan, that didn’t involve anything more than blind hope and luck.

At least it was step two complete. Step three wasn’t up to him, but it was already in motion - execute the plan.

It wasn’t a full plan. Poison hadn’t thought further than somehow managing to incapacitate the two Dracs. He hoped Kobra knew what to do, because he sure as hell didn’t.

Again, Poison put too much trust into the ten-year-old. Kobra had had his childhood snatched from, hadn’t ever been allowed to be anything but a soldier. 

Kobra knew what he was doing. 

And Poison had to trust that, so he waited until he could see Kobra quickly approaching the two Dracs. 

Three. 

Jet and Ghoul realized what was going on with a panicked glance back at Poison, wondering what Kobra was doing. The realization shown in the way they stepped forward. 

Two. 

Poison risked a glance at Kobra, narrowly motioning Jet to get the hell away from a blast that clipped his leg. Kobra was close.

One.

Kobra was about to come into the Dracs line of vision.

Poison threw the bottle.

He didn’t know what he expected; he couldn’t throw a heavy glass bottle too far and he couldn’t have expected it to land within the lines of authority.

But he aimed it as best he could to the right, away from Kobra and the two Dracs.

It shattered ten feet in front of the squadron.

The intention was met: It startled them. It startled them all into staring at the shattered glass, flinching even, and Poison dashed forward as Kobra took the opportunity to get his sharp little nails into the first Drac and - 

Poison didn’t have the time to watch the scene play out. He was back to being shot at and he’d abandoned any of the advantage distance and shelter gave him. You did that when you were dashing forward.

Pain blossomed through his arm.

Poison kept running. Ghoul was next to him. Ghoul was running too. Jet was running, somewhere, but Poison couldn’t see him.

After that it was a blur of pain and laserbeams and kicking and screaming and punching - at some point, Kobra had tossed him a white ray gun that was meant to be thrown at Ghoul, but Poison took it anyway, taking care to make sure it was on stun. 

The objective wasn’t to fight all the Dracs and cops. They’d never survive doing that, and Poison hoped the others had come to the same conclusion. 

The objective was to lower their ranks, send them into a panic. Make sure that enough of them were down that the group could run away safely.

They were cowards for running away. Running was a survival tactic, a way to make sure they survived long enough to even have dreams, let alone accomplish them. 

Running away was the one thing they were undoubtedly good at; they were all too young to be experts in combat, to hold the world’s knowledge. But they sure as hell knew how to  _ run. _

Poison didn’t drop the ray gun when Jet gestured for them all to run. Poison didn’t know if he could try to loosen his grip on the ray gun.

There was something about your first firefight, about the first time that death seems within your grasp, that makes you bond to the thing keeping you alive. It can be the people - it can be the weapon. In Poison’s case, it was both.

And, with his feet hitting the pavement as quickly as he could, hoping hoping  _ hoping _ that it was fast enough, he thought  _ I wish she and Cherri were here. _

He’d never see her again, though, and he’d never see the Cherri Cola that he grew up with again. He’d never see the same child in the mirror, either, because the kid he was had been inexperienced in life outside of his facility.

In life out in the City, with the possibility of death lingering on his lips like lipstick a shade too dark. 

Running was familiar. 

Poison could run. He always knew it was a last resort, and when the last resort came, he would already be running. Every single time.

They weren’t familiar with this area of the Lobby; they couldn’t go back to the police station, considering that it was in the opposite direction. 

Where were they going? Were they just drifting and hoping, hoping that they lost attention, that they weren’t being followed, that they could continue to be drifters in a city that was never theirs to call home?

No.

No, they weren’t going to be drifters. They weren’t going to hide, not anymore.

Poison didn’t quite know what directed him; it was like it was back in the facility, when they were running. Same situation, different location. Run from the company. 

Left.

Poison turned down an alley, having to backtrack and slamming his shoulder into the corner because of how late he got the message.

Message, huh? Was it a message from...something? Or was it just his paranoia acting up again, his need to save the world? To save himself? He still wonders why he chose to go down that alley.

Right.

They all exit the alley; Poison can hear all four sets of footsteps, but he knows that they don’t have much of a lead and he’ll be hearing a lot more soon. 

It opens up into a dingier neighborhood than he expected - or was it the neighborhood by Boron District, the one that Poison had seen as his first impression of the Lobby?

The graffiti was gone.

Forward.

Poison let the others run ahead of him, slowing down if only because of the absence in his heart presented by the absence of the graffiti, the art, the masterpiece. 

That was the city he was running from. The city that took away art. And Poison would learn just how bad that was, he’d learn the twisted reasons behind it, maybe he would even understand it in some part of his heart, locked away and never to be seen again, but he would never, never forgive them for that.

He would never forgive the city for washing away that piece.

“C’mon, where are we going?” Jet called back to Poison, snapping Poison out of the revenge-filled fantasies living in his head, the ones where he could magically bring back that single piece of art.

“I - I don’t know!” Truth be told, Poison only chose the first direction that popped into his head. He wasn’t sure whatever black magic he’d been dealt back in the facility would work again, and the idea that something so amazing like that graffiti was just as easily washed away, it made him doubt himself.

Could he be erased, just like that? 

There was something so beautiful about childhood naivety, even if Poison had never had much. Back when he was twelve, a runner, and he had to wonder if he could be forgotten.

“Pick a direction!” Ghoul shouted back at him, nearly hitting a trash can in the street for his efforts.

“Left!”

Left it was, into the next alley.

On and on the directions weaved them through the City, from the worst of neighborhoods to...slightly better neighborhoods. Maybe they’d even gone through a few districts.

But Poison was more concerned with how Kobra was lagging behind, panting too much and running too slow. 

None of them could  _ afford  _ to get tired. Kobra certainly couldn’t, though Poison didn’t know why at the time - Kobra was still young, could still be wiped completely blank.

He was young enough that if they wanted BLI could’ve completely erased Kobra’s memories of Poison, instead of blurring them and telling him a bullshit story about how Poison died and Kobra was taken away because of the trauma.

“Jet, get Kobra!”

Jet obliged, and while they all had to take a second -  _ stop _ for a second to let Jet scoop Kobra onto his soldiers, Poison pretended that the few second's loss of time didn’t matter.

When had the sirens started ringing out again? 

Had they ever stopped? Why was Poison so scatter-brained that he didn’t even know the answer?

Scatter-brained. Scattered. He wasn’t scattered when he needed to choose a direction, was he? 

He wasn’t scatter-brained when it counted, right?

Right?

Right!

Time to turn right!

They all tumbled through another alley, though this one was narrower and Poison hadn’t even realized that there would be another neighborhood. He thought the next street over would be the walls.

They were scary close to the walls of Battery City.

Scary close, but so far away. It was five feet of concrete on a foundation of even more. It was impossible to get out if you weren’t using those tunnels.

“Where do we go now?” Kobra asked curious, on top of Jet’s shoulders and half-sitting on the backpack Jet was wearing, but he didn’t seem to derive any happiness from the experience.

Things like that lost their joy when you were running for your life, unaware of the consequences of if you got caught so you let your imagination run wild. 

Poison belatedly realized that they were at a dead end. 

The neighborhood that appeared from out of the alley was a dead-end, circular with neat, old houses in a neat row with neat yards.

Except for the house in the middle.

Poison didn’t know what possessed him too, but he wanted to walk toward the house in the middle. The house in the middle was out of place - it was the same age as the houses around it, but it was different, and not because it was the house closest to the wall.

Poison didn’t realize it at the time, but maybe he was so confused about it because Battery City liked apartments more than it liked houses. There were very few intact houses from the Helium Wars, barely anything to build the city off of, so why were there an intact ring of houses so close to the wall?

Sometimes Poison wonders if that neighborhood was even real. 

“Where are you going?”

“Just - just trust me, yeah?” Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to tell his future crew to trust him after giving them many reasons not to trust him. “C’mon.” 

Even if it wasn’t, they were all young and dumb, too. Poison was familiar to them in a way the City wasn’t, in the way emotions weren’t, so of course they listened to him. 

The house in the middle was falling apart. The windows were completely gone, replaced with boarded up rotting wood, covered in illicit graffiti. The grass in the yard was trampled on and yellowing, dead patches beside the walkway. It was such a sight to see compared to the other houses, all nice and proper. 

“I don’t...wanna go there…”

“Don’t be worried, Ghoulie,” Poison had mumbled, entranced by the house. It had something.

A secret, maybe? 

“We don’t have the time for this, Poison! C’mon! Where next!” Ghoul was distressed, clearly, but Poison barely registered it. 

The house. He needed to go into the house.

They all needed to go into that house. 

Didn’t they need to run? Weren’t they running from...from...why were they running, again? 

“I asked you to trust me,” Poison mumbled, every one of his own footsteps reverberating in his ears as he stepped onto the old, cracked-cement path.

The house used to be a baby blue, maybe; two-stories, a garage. The perfect place to raise a family, left to rot out here, on the outskirts, in the slum district.

The baby blue paint had become a disgusting lime-type color, missing on complete sections of the house.

When he thought about it, the...door was in perfect condition. Perfectly white, with sparkling glass in the center.

For the first time since he walked into that neighborhood, Poison doubted himself. He doubted asking his friends to trust him, he doubted stepping onto that path.

Maybe it was just wasting them all time and then they’d all die because Poison was stupid enough to trust his paranoia, the feeling in the back of his head that said this was the right thing to do. 

Jet swallowed, Kobra still on his shoulders. “I don’t...If you think so, Pois. We trust you.” 

That was enough for Poison to believe in himself, if only for the time it took to walk from the sidewalk up to the door; in the time it took to kick open the door because it was locked and Poison was an angry kid with too much leg strength.

Inside the house, it was….empty. There wasn’t a goddamn thing.

Not a piece of furniture, not rotting food, not even bugs. Just...nothing. A layer of dust, maybe, kicked up by their boots, but nothing other than that.

There were no lights, either. Poison remembered that well. 

He remembered thinking,  _ what the hell? Who builds a house with no lights? _

Maybe a better question would be why he wanted to go into that house in the first place. Maybe a better question would be why he wanted to go into that house, the one that led exactly where it needed him to go?

Was the neighborhood, the house, even real?

The idea of a house with no lights, nothing in it, it was odd. At the time, Poison felt hazy, like he was looking at something from a time before but also a time after, like it was displaced but he didn’t know where it belonged.

He didn’t know where  _ he  _ belonged.

“I don’ wanna be here…” 

“Just - just a minute, Kobes, swear,” Poison waved off his little brother’s concern, too busy exploring the house, taking in every little detail.

There were no doors. The once white, now mottled yellow walls divided up the house, but there were no doors, and there were no hinges or imprints of hinges to suggest there ever were.

Except for one door.

There was one door, at the end of the hallway branching off from the empty, old kitchen.

The hallway stretched the longer Poison looked at it. The door loomed, pristine and perfectly white with too many shadows coming from beneath it and Poison didn’t know why there was that one, singular door, designed to sit there and torture him.

Poison dashed toward the door. There was no real reason to run other than how much he wanted to open that damn door and see what was beyond it, see why it was taunting him or see that the stress of breaking out of a van after realizing that he wasn’t any kind of savior and then running for his life had finally broken him.

A shame it would be near impossible to get Poison off the throne he would build. Not then, not anywhere near then, no.

Back then, it was just a scared kid opening a door and realizing that it was a basement. It led down to a basement, with creaky wooden steps descending into the darkness.

Something told Poison that beyond the creepiness of the random basement he’d found himself staring into, he needed to go down those steps.

They  _ all  _ needed to go down into that basement. They needed to find a way to leave, leave,  _ leave  _ this house but Poison knew it would be useless to exit the way they entered.

For the first time since seeing the abandoned house in the neighborhood, Poison thought about how they were wanted kids. They were wanted, and they would be shot if they were found. What if they’d been followed to the house? What if, what if,  _ what if? _

Poison found himself rushing down the stairs, barely catching himself when the shift in temperature startled him enough to stumble. It was cold. 

It was incredibly, incredibly cold, and frankly, it sent a chill down Poison’s spine that even the Desert’s harsh temperatures and drop-dead sun wouldn’t be able to bleach from his memory.

There was no light other than that spilled out of the door to the house, and even that was dimmed by the dust particles filling both the air and his lungs with a heavy sense of wrong, wrong,  _ wrong _ . 

Poison kept walking down the stairs. The wood splintered under his weight, but it didn’t break until Jet stepped on it - at which point it broke, and sent Jet stumbling forward into the rest of them. 

Which sent Poison tumbling face-first onto the concrete floor, uneven due to being abandoned before it was finished. It’d bruise on his cheekbone, but all he did was get up and flip the staircase off. 

And then the door shut, 

Kobra jumped, right into Poison’s shoulder, sending Poison’s arms around Kobra to make sure he didn’t fall and meet the same fate Poison did mere moments before. 

“What - what was that?” Kobra asked, and there was that scared kid again, scared of the dark and scared of things he couldn’t explain.

Kobra was used to being the genius, the smart kid, the one who always passed his training courses with flying colors and never failed. He never failed, and he was never afraid.

It was only then, with Kobra clinging to Poison’s shoulder, did Poison realize that Kobra was only then starting to experience fear for what it was. The heart-stopping, hand-shaking fear that jumped through you like a lightning strike. 

Fear wasn’t something you learned. It was something you experienced, but Kobra didn’t experience fear when they escaped; when they were running from the cops; he knew running, and he knew danger.

It’s funny how something like a shut basement door could cause so much realization. Like an omen.

“I don’t know,” Poison swallowed, and gathered all the confidence he could into his voice. It wasn’t much. Not when it was too dark to figure out where the walls were - where the others were. “Let’s explore, yeah?”

“With the flashlights we definitely have?” Ghoul said, deadpan. Ghoul’s voice had always had a certain rasp to it, something that made it distinctly him in a way the others couldn’t place.

Poison didn’t answer, but Jet mumbled something along the lines of, “We’ll use you as a glowstick if we have to.”

Paying attention to their bickering was proving impossible though, because Poison elected to keep walking forward, Kobra always in step with him, and he wasn’t finding an ending to the basement.

There had to be a wall somewhere. Every room had to end; that was just basic logic and common sense.

Poison was  _ not  _ sacrificing common sense and logic just yet. 

The darkness made it clear that Poison wasn’t going to be able to see if Jet and Ghoul were following dutifully like they were supposed to. Splitting up was never a good idea - one good lesson Poison had learned in his years as a lab rat - but it was impossible to tell if they were all on track.

None of them could hear the sound of their footsteps.

They were all naturally quiet walkers, due to their upbringing and due to constant drilling whenever a facilitator caught them making too much noise, but it barely crossed Poison’s mind that it was odd he couldn’t hear anyone’s footsteps, that there was no sounds of breathing. No sounds of general life were kept within the walls Poison couldn’t find, and it made so much sense in that basement it wasn’t noticeable. 

“You following?” Poison asked eventually, breaking the silence the darkness of the basement tried so hard to keep. 

Poison was starting to think that it was less of a basement he was exploring and more of a tunnel he was following. A dark, pitch-black tunnel, with a lack of life and an abundance of dust made solely to fill his lungs. 

He got no response. It would’ve been concerning, but he knew for a fact Kobra was still attached to his arm, and he heard Ghoul curse as he dropped something-or-other on the ground. 

That was two out of three, so it was safe to assume Jet was also following.

_ Just a tunnel,  _ Poison thought,  _ just a tunnel. Tunnels end, don’t they? And it won’t be closed off? What if it opens up in some high rise district in the City?  _

If Poison was being honest with himself, he’d had no idea which direction they were going. He knew which direction the basement had originally let out in, but Poison could barely tell if he was turning or not, if they were walking in circles or if they were walking in a straight line.

Then he tripped again. It was ironic, really, where he tripped. There was so much the future would hold from him, and it would take years to piece together the simple logic of why he tripped over blocks of concrete. 

Kobra fell with him, and Poison offhand thought that they should stop falling so often. It wasn’t the best image, y’know? 

They’d tripped over concrete rubble. Concrete rubble, when so far they hadn’t encountered anything that even remotely blocked their path.

In fact, no one was even holding their hands out to drag against the side of the tunnel. They knew where they were going, or maybe their subconscious’ knew and they weren’t allowed to finish the puzzle yet.

Who needed a direction when you had destiny?

Nevertheless, they kept walking, but some light from half-burned candles placed ominously every forty feet or so lit their path, if poorly, to keep them from tripping over the randomly placed rubble in the path.

The walls were dirt and stone, held up by rotting wooden beams above their heads, small enough that Jet had to duck to keep from hitting his head.

The rubble changed, though. The candles placed here and there never did, but the rubble did. It went from chunks of concrete and compact dirt, into rusted pieces of metal. Some of the metal was a lone beam, but other times it was rebar sticking out at odd angles from the low-hanging lack of ceiling above them, twisted at an angle like someone tried to make sure no one would get decapitated. 

Some of the rebar was cut, and the sharp edge still gleamed, a warning, but Poison didn’t know what kind.

Where were they going? How far underground were they? They had to be decently far beneath the surface of the city, but when Poison turned around to try gauging how far they’d gone - maybe count the candles to get a better grasp - he couldn’t see any candles other than those in front of him and a singular candle behind them.

Like they’d never been lit at all. 

Poison turned back, to keep walking, and so did the others. They were all rattled, but no one said a thing.

If someone spoke, it would echo, and Poison was afraid of how far it could echo, or how long he’d have to hear his own voice. Or maybe it wouldn’t echo, and he’d realize they weren’t alone. Either way, it didn’t end well. 

It stayed silent. 

At some point. Kobra let go of Poison’s arm, content to walk on his own because he could see his family and he could see where he was walking. Neverending walking.

None of them got tired, of course, but it was still tiring mentally if anything. Maybe they walked miles. Maybe they walked blocks. It was impossible to tell which was what and what was which with the tunnel stretching on and on, until the candlelight couldn’t be seen. They all knew what was behind them: a void of lost light. 

Then, Poison felt a need to stop. He only realized after the fact that Jet and Ghoul had stopped before he had, and Kobra caught on in a moment.

They stopped because...Why did they stop? 

Noise. There was noise.  _ There was noise! _

The fear of meeting a hostile audience rather than a bustling city barely crossed Poison’s mind - he bolted in the direction of the sound - forward - and that was that. He wanted to hear something, anything, anything that wasn’t his own voice and anything that said there might be hope after all.

That he wasn’t lost.

That’s when sound came back into his life, when he came out of the silence: he could hear his own boots scuffing against the dirt as he ran, his own breath as he inhaled; the others’ boots kicking up dirt and the way Kobra was struggling to keep up with them ever-so-slightly.

It wasn’t voices they were hearing, though; Poison identified the noise as the whispers of a harsh wind, but it was  _ noise _ wasn’t it? What did it matter what it was?

Maybe he could hear a little too well, like there was something messing with his head and hadn’t tuned him into the right frequency. 

But Poison wasn’t the quickest runner, and he wasn’t the most determined to hear the noise - that would be Jet, and Jet was the one who barely caught himself from tripping for a second time that day over…

Over stairs?

Poison was starting to get tired of this whole stairs thing. He wasn’t going to step up to another never-ending hallway with an ominous placement of candles that went out conveniently, right? 

He wasn’t. 

In fact, at the top of the stairs, was a door. It was concrete; the ceiling had shifted from dirt and rebar to steel and concrete a few blurry feet ago, and it took Jet and Ghoul and Poison lifting it to get it to budge.

When it did, it was like escaping the facility for the first time.

There was  _ sunshine. _

There was a difference between Battery City’s manufactured sunshine and the real, true,  _ hot  _ sun. Poison could feel it instantly.

The group, the soon-to-be killjoys, stood there, mesmerized, with beads of sweat already forming at the napes of their necks and staring at the bluest sky they’d ever seen, the  _ only  _ truly blue sky they’d ever seen, the first of many dawns painting the sky in splotches of colors they’d never truly  _ seen  _ before, the night fading away along with the fear of the tunnel.

When Poison started to scramble to pull himself up through the door, getting sand in his mouth and his eyes as he did so but not  _ caring  _ about the sting because that was the  _ sun _ and he’d never seen the sun before, not like this, the others started to scramble after him, creating a mess of children and desert and dawns.

They were  _ in the desert. _

The tunnel had gone on so long but it wasn’t forgotten sewers underneath a City built upon the forgotten ruins of another, it was a path to the  _ desert _ . 

Jet murmured curses, and Ghoul was grinning, shouting,  _ they made it,  _ **_they made it!_ **

Kobra was still at Poison’s side, but he was smiling, he was smiling and he realized it too; they were staring at the sky, the real sky and the real sun, they were out in the  _ Zones _ and they weren’t in the city anymore!

“What...what do we do now?” 

_ Of course, _ Ghoul had to ask, after his shouting drifted out, lost to the expanse of the Desert. 

Then the glory of the sun and the sky started to fade away, just as the quickly the dark blues left painting what had to be the west side of the sky, and then it was just four kids, all alone. 

All alone, with nothing in sight but a door that had shut the moment they left it. All alone, with nothing except the clothes on their backs and -

_ And Jet’s backpack. _

Poison hadn’t even  _ noticed _ Jet hadn’t had his backpack taken!

The Dracs and the cops were smart enough to handcuff them all, but they put them in a van  _ together _ and didn’t even take what was on their persons? No pat-downs, nothing?

Then it dawned on Poison, like the dawn was rising over the sky.

_ No one thought they were threats.  _ They were children, new to surviving on their own and new to living with anything other than a rigid schedule that didn’t allow for mistakes and bunk beds that didn’t allow for individual thought and growth.

Poison didn’t  _ want  _ to be any less of a threat than that killjoy he met, that set off the alarms. One killjoy, Mike Milligram, set off all of those sirens simply by being there, didn’t he?

Poison wanted to be like that. He wanted to be a threat, he wanted to be someone who wasn’t regarded as a child and someone who wasn’t watered-down only to be thought of as a rogue statistic in an experiment that wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place.

And out in the Desert, in the world bursting of enough color that he had to squint his eyes and heat that was quickly making him want to shed the dirty shirt off his back, the childish innocent he held close to his heart could flourish, though he didn’t know that was what was guiding him.

It was the desperation to  _ be  _ somebody, the desperation to be anyone that mattered and the desperation to be more than he was meant to be. The desperation to be anything  _ except  _ average, and the time, it didn’t matter whether he took off and soared through the sky or crashed and burned into a ditch.

“We walk,” Poison said simply, blankly, his mind trying to process but not being able to catch up the way it was supposed to, not being able to process all the thoughts running through his head and the fear and the hope in his heart to be a  _ killjoy. _

Walk they did. 

The Desert sun was unforgiving and harsh when time passed enough for it to become overhead, in a way that Poison had never experienced underneath the regulation of Battery City’s temperatures. 

It was another silent walk, but during that silent journey, Poison was distinctly aware of the signs of life that surrounded his future crewmates, about the people that had saved his life and would continue to save his life in more ways than one.

At some point, Kobra had taken his dirty, stolen shirt to put above his head, to block out some of the heat. The sun was glaring at them, taunting,  _ you made it, what are you going to do now? _

The others followed suit. The relief it provided wasn’t much, but they had no other way to staunch the rays of blistering heat beating down on them, determined to dehydrate them.

While they wouldn’t have gotten tired if they were walking in the city, the sand was loose underneath their non-desert suited boots and they didn’t have the longest legs, not at all. Poison was exhausted. And he knew the others were getting tired.

Especially Kobra. But it was too hot and Jet was too tired to offer to carry him again. That, Kobra being the youngest and the smallest of them all (at the time), was what made Poison realize that they  _ needed _ a break.

They needed a break if they were going to survive, but the sun was unrelenting and the sand dunes went on for miles with no semblance of civilization.

“Hey, Jet,” Poison asked, but his voice was already scratchy from the lack of water in his mouth and the lack of speaking he’d been doing in the last hours. “D’ya have any water in your backpack?”

Jet shook his head with a sigh. “I...No, I don’t. I’ve got my blanket, and - and I dunno, some of Ghoul’s markers and the stickers Kobra stole from some vending machine. Some of your shit. Useless stuff like that, I guess.” 

“Then why don’t you just dump it?” Ghoul asked snidely, out of character and too snappy to sound like himself. Maybe it was the heat and the dehydration that was getting to him, or maybe it was the uncomfortable way his sweat rubbed between his hands and his arms. Not like Poison knew that yet. 

There was appall covering Jet’s face and Poison would understand why, later, because Poison would learn to appreciate things like teddy bears and comfort blankets and the stupid trinkets stolen from vending machines. They became part of who you were, in a way that made the Desert seem less like a harsh barren desert and more like a home. 

More like a home than Battery City would  _ ever  _ be. 

“I can’t do that!”

“You’re being ridiculous! It’s just extra weight! We’re not gonna make it anywhere if you’re just lugging those useless things around!” 

“Stop it, Ghoul! You don’t get it! Whatever, whatever - I’m keeping the backpack! We’re not gonna find anything anyway and I swear to who - whoever the Lobby swears too that it’s not useless!”

“It’s all useless  _ garbage!  _ And if you think that any of it is gonna make this hopeless trek across this stupid barren Desert any better, then you’re just as messed up -”

“Stop it!” 

Even Poison, startled, turned his gaze away from the arguing pair of to-be killjoys, to stare at Kobra.

Kobra, who was crying. He had stomped one of his ill-fitting boots into the sand, with one arm down and one arm holding the other, scratching at it until it was red. “I said stop it! We’re never gonna get anywhere if you keep arguing the way you are! Please!”

Poison didn’t even  _ know  _ that Kobra knew the word please. 

Ghoul shut up, head tilted like he was trying to analyze who the hell that was and where the hell Kobra went. 

But Kobra stood his ground, glaring at them, pretending his tears weren’t there and stayed with crossed arms. “You need to stop arguing. Stop arguin’ and we can find somewhere to stay before night.”

“...Yeah. Yeah, we do need to find somewhere before night,” Jet sighed, dropping his gaze away from Kobra.

In hindsight, Kobra’s childish, if justified, outburst probably saved their lives. 

Trudging through the sand, up sand dunes and down so many times that it all blurred together and Poison couldn’t even tell when the temperature changed from burning hot to freezing cold and the sky changed from the midday sun to a mocking moon.

The cold was almost as unbearable as the heat. Except the scraps on their backs barely did anything to keep them warm, to keep Poison’s fingertips from turning an ugly purple, even when he put his stolen shirt back on. 

Teeth chattering, they trudged on. They had to keep walking. Night had fallen, but Poison would not.

He was their leader, now. He was leading them somewhere, anywhere, leading them through the dark and through the ache in his heart that said they were going to die out here, that Kobra was going to drop first because he was smaller and he was the youngest, that Jet was suddenly going to be lost within the silence of the Desert, the static that rung out in the absence of anything.

That Ghoul was going to fall behind, trip, maybe, and never get up.

That it would be Poison, just Poison, wandering so aimlessly that he was a ghost himself; maybe he would be a ghost, too aimless to even know he died, too busy trying to lead spirits and a spirit that abandoned him so. 

Poison  _ needed  _ to save them. 

They were his crew. They were his  _ family.  _ And maybe he hadn’t been out of Battery City’s control,  _ Better Living Industries control,  _ to know what family was supposed to be, but if it was supposed to be people he would die for in a heartbeat, that he wanted to fight with side by side rather than in front of or behind. Next to. Side-by-side.

That first night in the Desert, the wandering, the loss of purpose but the ubiquity of fear, fear,  _ fear.  _

Poison was  _ scared.  _ Scared that the others, his family, himself, were going to be victims of the static that rung through his ears, that he wasn’t going to be able to find anywhere for them to hide before someone dropped, frozen down to the liquid in their veins.

Why wouldn’t he be scared?

But fear kept him moving. Fear kept him rushing, rushing around, over the never-ending sand dunes, urging the others to keep up, that if they did then they had to find something, somewhere.

What Poison found, looking out over a new sand dune, wasn’t a person. But it was a place.

It wasn’t just a place, it was a landmark. It was something he’d become accustomed to calling Route Guano.

There, right then, right when Poison shouted out that he found something and that  _ something  _ might just be what saved them, it wasn’t Route Guano, and it wasn’t just a cracked road. It was his Getaway Mile. 

It was  _ their  _ Getaway Mile.  _ They.  _ A group of experiments. A  _ family  _ of rebels.

He didn’t know how they felt about their little group, about if they thought they were a family or not. 

The mood, though, was more amicable, more  _ alive,  _ because they knew that maybe they would make it through the night.

They might make it through the night without dying of cold. 

Even if Poison was holding Kobra, their steps clumsy and out of sync, because Kobra was starting to get drowsy, starting to complain that he felt too hot and  _ maybe he should just take his shirt off or something _ , despite the purple Poison could see blotching his skin from his fingertips up to his neck, the redness of his nose. 

No words had to be shared between the other three.

Jet took the blanket out of his backpack, the blanket that Jet  _ never  _ let the rest of them touch, and wrapped it around Kobra’s shoulders, opting to hold him bridal style. Kobra needed it. Poison was too tired to keep guiding him, wasn’t strong enough to pick him up.

Jet was tired, too. They were  _ all  _ tired. They couldn’t keep going like this.

Poison, at least, couldn’t keep going. It was so tiring to keep walking. They were along a road now.

He shouldn’t  _ have  _ to be a leader anymore. He was done leading them, he didn’t know where else to lead them. To salvation?

They were their  _ own  _ saviors. Who else was going to save them? Why did they always have to save themselves? Why couldn’t someone else do something for once, why couldn’t someone else find them, save them all, keep them from a cold death in a scathing Desert?

Was it the cold talking? Was it the shivering, the way he wanted to lay on the ground and  _ die _ , but the road was colder than the air around him, and that’s why he kept going? 

He just wanted it to be over. It was cold. He was barely alive, freezing and shivering and bumping into Jet and Ghoul as he fell into step with them. They were all shivering; Kobra, still, too cold to fall asleep in Jet’s arms. 

Then Jet tripped. 

It wasn’t tripping because his feet were finally too frozen to carry his weight anymore, like Poison was on the brink of, but because Jet tried to run forward, get ahead, pointing to somewhere, though Kobra was thrown forward into the cold sand. 

“Gu - guys!” Jet said, pointing, smiling, but Poison couldn’t see anything and Poison didn’t know if he wanted to or not. He didn’t know whether Jet would be pointing out something good or not, because with how cold Poison was he would’ve welcomed a ray gun blast to heat up his chest as it blew his heart out. 

It was too far-off in the distance for Poison to make it out. However Jet saw whatever he was pointing to was beyond Poison, beyond Ghoul it seemed as well, and...and Kobra hadn’t gotten up from where Jet had accidentally thrown him. 

That’s why Kobra didn’t yelp at all. Poison scrambled over to him, trying to pry the blanket from Kobra’s fingers.

His fingers were completely white to rival the blotchy purple with how much pressure he was using to hold onto the blanket, but it came out of his grasp easily. Kobra was just staring, staring at the night stars with a glassy-eyed gaze, awake but… But too cold, too far down in an attempt of his head to stop what he thought would be a painful demise.

Whatever Jet saw? They needed to go.  _ Now.  _

Poison frantically picked Kobra up, no regard for how little he weighed or all the sand that got under his nails, no regard for how the sand wasn’t packed underneath his boots or the cold, not anymore.

He was right. Poison had never hated being right more than that, at least then, than he did at that moment. Kobra wouldn’t make it through the night if they didn’t get to shelter. Something warm. Anything warm.

And when day rose again, even if Kobra did make it through the night, the shock of the temperature change would probably kill him instead. It wouldn’t be the first ‘joy subjected to the toying of the moon and the sun, twin killers.

Jet didn’t take his blanket back from the obviously freezing child, didn’t say a thing, but pointed Poison in the direction he needed to be running and hung back ever-so-slightly to help Ghoul. 

Running was ingrained into Poison’s head long before he came to the Desert, but that night in the Zones taught him that he didn’t just had to run from BLI; he had to  _ run from the elements.  _ The way the elements killed was often worse than a ray gun blast and a cold body bag.

It still surprised him he didn’t see a single body bag that night. The only one he saw was in his imagination, the one that he was sure he’d be zipping Kobra in if he didn’t get him to shelter.

Running. Stumbling. Tripping - but not falling. Stumbling more. Sand in his boot. But the cracked pavement road they were following, their Getaway Mile, it kept him running, quick enough for it to  _ matter.  _

The lack of the loose sand made it easier to run. It made it easier to save his little brother - and just as Jet said, Poison started to see something in the distance. 

Maybe it wasn’t an actual shelter. Maybe it was somewhere abandoned, left to nature and they would all die there, but it was somewhere that wasn’t outside, and at least they would get a choice on whether or not they wanted to die under the stars or not. 

It wasn’t an abandoned house left to the dunes, though.

In fact, it was Dr. Death Defying’s radio station, - better known as WKIL - and the yet-to-be Fabulous Killjoys clumsily collapsed by the doorstep.

Well, Ghoul collapsed, laying against the door, and Jet frantically nodded, while Poison rocked and cooed Kobra like he was a baby, like that would help the glassy-eyed stare or the hypothermia starting to kill him. 

Not  _ starting  _ to kill him.  _ Finishing the job. _

And Poison didn’t know yet - he didn’t know who his brother would become; he barely had any hope that they were all going to make it through the night. 

They would make it through the night, though, all of them.

Because the one who answered the door? The one who threw open the door, flinging Ghoul onto the sandy-hardwood floor? 

That was Show Pony. Show Pony, who was always a bleeding heart, but to Poison, right then, he didn’t know Pony; all he knew was that he was desperate, and he wanted help, and he didn’t care what he had to do to get it. 

It was a trait every Zonerunner knew well. From their early days, at least.

“Help,” was all Poison could mutter, softly, his voice breaking in the middle of it, helplessly looking down at Kobra in his arms, huddled into the blanket with closed eyes.

The bickering between the Doctor and Pony all became a blur to Poison as the shivering group was ushered into the small radio station, guided toward a too-small couch; Ghoul was practically sitting in Jet’s lap it was so small, with Kobra laying on all three of them. 

It was crowded, and there was  _ stuff everywhere,  _ but the relief was instant, if burning: it was warm. It was  _ warm!  _ Maybe it was just average temperature inside the station, but Poison was so cold that the air itself burned his skin; his nerves felt alight and it  _ hurt  _ but it was better than the cold.

Even that wasn’t enough to shock Kobra out of whatever he was going through. Wasn’t enough to bring him back from the brink.

“How long have you darlin’s been out?” Pony asked, worried, with no response from the back, in the room that Poison couldn’t see and didn’t care to see, and that’s why he started to register the dialogue, that someone was talking and that someone was  _ talking to him.  _

He was cold, scared, tired, and afraid for his brother’s life. He didn’t  _ care  _ if Pony and the Doctor were hostile. At least they would die warm, right?

“All day ‘n night,” said Poison, quiet, petting Kobra’s hair, not sure what to do. Everything was.. _.blurry,  _ but in the way that everything in his sight was perfectly clear, and yet it felt so  _ wrong  _ and it felt like a dream.

“And how are ya still kickin’?”

“Dumb luck and sheer invincibility?” Ghoul muttered, too tired to even make a grin accompany the joke. 

“Well… Y’all are gonna make good ‘joys if you can survive that weather long enough ta’ make a joke!”

“Can we just have some food, maybe? Blankets? Shit, yeah - Kobra! Blankets!” Poison damn near shouted, shocked out of the strange, sleepy calm he’d been placed under due to the warmth. 

Kobra was not going to die, thank you very much! And he wouldn’t, though it would take a week of the best Zones care (and Show Pony) to keep him alive long enough to truly stargaze with them.

After they’d gotten Kobra bundled up, with...something on his face that Pony said would help, the other three all collapsed onto the couch again, leaning on each other, like they always would. 

Pony laughed at them, skating back into the room, holding a tray of...dog food cans? “The chef is back - with some gourmet fuckin’ fruit gels!”

“That is dog food.” 

“Oh, you shut up! It’s the best we’ve got this time’a year. Plus, you’ll need’ta eat it eventually. Good for you,” Pony huffed, tossing each of them a can, though the last can hit Ghoul in the face and jerked him from however close to sleep he was. “I’ll be back soon, darlin’s, with some blankets for all of you. Eat up.”

They did eat; Jet found the Power Pup tasty, Ghoul found it tolerable, and Poison nearly vomited, but by the time Pony came back with blankets, they were all passed out.

All of them passed out, laying on each other and huddling together. Like a family. Like a crew.

“Oh,” Pony laughed to themself, gently laying a few blankets on the trio, with the fourth member close-by, “You’re just gonna be Fabulous Killjoys, ain’t you?” 

That part of the story was yet to come.

**Author's Note:**

> This...took me way longer than I thought it would! You'll notice the similarities to the original, aptly named GENERATION NOTHING., but I couldn't drop the concept. So! Tell me what you think! :D


End file.
